[coreboot] Coreboot on ARM? (was: Re: Coreboot or UEFI, who will be the winner.)

[Ken.Fuchs at bench.com]

> 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