Hi Robert,
On 19.03.2009 19:58, Robert Vogel wrote:
Hi Carl-Daniel,
I'm just looking for a simple desktop solution that has as few 'closed' components as possible. Enough so that it can be more trustworthy.
Last year I wrote the related page, so it isn't up to date. Correct me on the points that bother you though and I'll fix it.
Sorry, no offense intended.
Here is the (incomplete) list of errors in the BIOS section.
I am not aware of single motherboard manufacturer that offers an open source BIOS.
Tyan offers boards with coreboot. Silicon Mechanics offers boards with coreboot (though not necessarily boards manufactured by them).
The most likely vendors (Tyan and Giga) have no interest in allowing a substitute BIOS.
See above.
The Free Software Foundation is working on it
No.
It is not practical, right now, for a personal computer.
Works for quite a few boards in the consumer range.
The Free Software Foundation has listed motherboards http://linuxbios.org/index.php/Supported_Motherboards [11]
No, it's the coreboot project/group. The FSF has nothing to do with it.
It has two Free & Open Source BIOS: One, thanks to AMD engineer Yinghai Lu who released GPL-licensed code, and the other is from *LinuxBIOS*, a Free Software project.
Really? Yinghai contributed his code to coreboot. Only one implementation.
The modifications and determination of payload are, I think, challenging.
It depends on what you want. SeaBIOS is pretty much what everyone wants nowadays.
The FSF page makes this quite clear.
coreboot, not FSF.
It comes in about 4 different forms, one with SPI.
No. Two with SPI.
LinuxBIOS runs on many embedded boards, for example the [...] OLPC "XO" laptop ([6] laptop.org) .
No longer on the OLPC.
My question remains, which 64-bit, coreboot board would be best for a fully functional desktop ?
The Asus M2V-MX SE. It even works without a video BIOS, giving you probably the most free solution with integrated graphics and 64bit.
Would you expect trouble with it ?
No board is completely tested. There will always be some corner case that is untested and/or not working yet. That even applies to proprietary BIOS.
If you have no way to recover from a bad flash, you should not reflash or update any BIOS, regardless of whether it is open source or not.
Regards, Carl-Daniel
P.S. RMS thinks a closed source BIOS is OK as long as it is stored in a real non-reflashable ROM because it is no longer software but hardware.