On Feb 11, 2008 4:07 PM, Ward Vandewege ward@gnu.org wrote:
The FSF would like to prepare some PR around this response an FSF supporter got from Intel customer care representative asking them about support for free BIOS on Intel hardware. Any thoughts from the coreboot community on this?
Thanks for your email.
Writing BIOS code is not like writing an OS device driver.
Yeah, nobody here knows what they're doing *eyeroll*
Chipset specifications can vary not just between chipset models, but between steppings of the same chipset. Problems in chipset hardware and problems in BIOS code are hard to distinguish without specific hardware instrumentation. End user BIOS replacement with a third- party BIOS (whether free or not) on a commercial motherboard is not allowed by nearly all hardware vendors because of the potential for BIOS viruses and the risk of rendering the hardware useless through ill-advised modifications.
Some (most?) hardware vendors say they only support MS Windows, the same logic could be applied. An open-source firmware provides a lot more assurance that the BIOS is free of malicious code.
For example, a laptop battery could explode if incorrect power management algorithms were applied.
And with the support of the vendor(s) and some better documentation, we can know how to avoid such issues.
BIOS is a part of the reliability and performance promise of the
hardware. Chipset specifications at the level being discussed are commonly considered proprietary by all silicon vendors, not just Intel.
Right. Because describing the boot process is somehow beneficial to the competition. I've seen a bunch of NDA'd docs from Via, and frankly, I'm completely lost as to how that would help anyone except a BIOS or driver developer.
The open source firmware work that Intel *is* sponsoring could lead to a
solution where proprietary low-level chipset initialization code from silicon vendors is made compatible with open source higher-level platform initialization and pre-boot management. If you are interested, we invite you to participate at www.tianocore.org.
Thanks once again for your interest in Intel.
Sincerely,
Intel Customer Support
I haven't the ambition to register with the site, is there any actual hardware init code there? And what's the point of starting another project, when coreboot can already load tiano (so I've heard)?
Thanks,
Ward.
-- Ward Vandewege ward@fsf.org Free Software Foundation - Senior System Administrator
Thanks for trying!
-Corey