On 09/20/2012 11:49 AM, Tarl Neustaedter wrote:
On 2012-Sep-20 13:01 , JD wrote:
This is from a thread "UEFI bootkit" on fedora-users mailing list
On 09/20/2012 05:09 AM, Alan Cox wrote:
The required information for almost all X86 devices is not available. You can't build an open firmware for most x86 platforms from public information.
Alan
Is the above assertion true?
Replacing "X86 devices" with "X86 systems", it's pretty close. A lot of the initialization of various Intel and AMD CPU chipsets is not publicly available, and the BIOS vendors work very closely with the chip vendors during initial fabrication stages to get their code right. As I understand it from the people down the hall, It's not so much that the initialization is secret as much as it's difficult and poorly documented. And neither chip vendor is willing to take the effort to make the information readily available.
Most cases I've seen of people using openbios on real hardware have allowed the standard BIOS to initialize the chipsets and then take over before booting (in some cases, they boot openbios as a binary from a virtual floppy).
So if the initialization code is not publicly available, but is made available to Bios makers, could or would the devs of openbios.org contact AMD and Intel, sign NDA's and implement the initialization code in openbios? Or is there more to it than that?