ron minnich wrote (ao):
There's more and more interest in the last two years in coreboot. Customers really want it.
It's just that PC vendors are worried about providing it for some reason.
PC vendors need to be careful, they're building closed ecosystems now around the PC platform. It's quite amazing how much more closed the PC platform is than it was in 1994 or even 1999.
Closed ecosystems die.
Here at linuxcon and other recent conferences, all the real innovation and cool stuff is ARM-based. PCs are those big, expensive, hot, closed things that you're not allowed to hack. Really wonderful stuff being done on OMAP 35.
Sander wrote:
Pardon my ignorance, but there is no Coreboot for ARM based hardware AFAICS?
On the OpenMoko Freerunner one boots with 'u-boot'. U-boot is a bootloader, and as such not comparable with Coreboot I think. Does ARM have BIOS firmware at all? I've googled but failed to find the answer.
Das U-Boot is directly comparable to coreboot. U-Boot is almost always used on non-x86 architectures, but it does a similar sort of hardware initialization on those architectures that coreboot does on x86 architectures. U-Boot does not have a payload structure like coreboot, but U-Boot can load executables (usually an operating system) and U-Boot scripts. U-Boot has a TCP/IP stack and USB stack, a system of drivers, maintains a non-volatile set of environment variables, etc. It is a reasonably well designed system that is more often than not used as a bootloader with full boot device initialization for non-x86 architectures.
I suggest that coreboot designers look at how U-Boot is designed, and conversely U-Boot designers look at how coreboot is designed. I know that some have already done this. Perhaps both projects have done some things better than the other and can share ideas and even higher level architecture independent code.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Das_U-Boot
Sincerely,
Ken Fuchs