[coreboot] LinuxTag presentation highlights

[David Hendricks]

 Looks good so far. A couple more points to bring up:

12. Coreboot is highly configurable (via menu-driven Linux Kconfig) and can
be easily tailored for both server *and* embedded applications -- A single
firmware core for platforms both big and small.

13. Development and compilation are done using free/open source tools -- No
costly proprietary development tools are needed (in addition to a costly
proprietary firmware core).

On Thu, May 22, 2008 at 9:23 AM, Carl-Daniel Hailfinger <
c-d.hailfinger.devel.2006 at gmx.net> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> if you know of any cool features in coreboot, flashrom, buildrom,
> libpayload, coreinfo etc., please list them in response to this mail.
> Since I'm working almost exclusively on v3 and flashrom, I'm bound to
> miss the exciting news/features in other areas, so please help me out.
>
> Exciting coreboot features are:
> 1. Almost every (free) operating system can be used as a payload in ROM
> 2. Having an OS in ROM means it works even if HDD/UDB/NIC are broken
> 3. Logging in with SSH is possible regardless of the brokenness of local
> storage if the payload has a SSH server or can load one via network
> 4. Security against viruses/malware: If write protection for the ROM is
> active (and can't be circumvented), the OS in ROM can't be compromised
> 5. Improved diagnostics: We don't rely on the usual cryptic and
> uninformative beep codes, but output meaningful english error and debug
> messages via the serial port
> 6. Error and status messages are saved in RAM (v3 only) and can be read
> by the OS during or after boot with a dmesg-like mechanism
> 7. Extemely high speed: We have a record of ~600 ms from poweron to
> bootloader, which is in stark contrast to the 10-30 seconds for
> proprietary BIOS
> 8. Anything supported by the hardware can be supported by coreboot: Some
> universities use the second processor socket of a dual processor board
> for a FPGA instead f a processor
> 9. The code is written almost completely in C with ~100 lines assembly
> remaining per architecture, compared to pure assembly for proprietary BIOS
> 10. Recompilation of the whole firmware with arbitrary features takes
> 10-30 seconds (v3 only)
> 11. You decide which features (EFI/OpenFirmware/BIOS/etc) you want, the
> vendor can't limit you
>
> Exciting flashrom features are:
> 1. No reboot needed for BIOS update
> 2. No DOS/Windows needed for BIOS update
> 3. Cross-flashing is possible
> 4. Hot-flashing is possible
>
> Regards,
> Carl-Daniel
>
> --
> coreboot mailing list
> coreboot at coreboot.org
> http://www.coreboot.org/mailman/listinfo/coreboot
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.coreboot.org/pipermail/coreboot/attachments/20080525/4c8e3092/attachment.html>