[coreboot] Your Opinion: The Best Board for coreboot ?
Carl-Daniel Hailfinger
c-d.hailfinger.devel.2006 at gmx.net
Thu Mar 19 20:39:17 CET 2009
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.
--
http://www.hailfinger.org/
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