[coreboot] [RFC] Revive LinuxBIOS as new project for Linux in flash ROM chip

ron minnich rminnich at gmail.com
Sat Dec 2 22:26:49 CET 2017


Over the last few months I discussed reviving the LinuxBIOS name with a
number of folks inside and outside the coreboot community. I still pretty
much own the name: for old times's sake I kept the LinuxBIOS Inc.
corporation and linuxbios.org domain name.

There was a strong feeling that using the name LinuxBIOS for this new
project did not make much sense, largely because we're not building a BIOS;
and, also, it might confuse people with the old project or with coreboot.

After some iterations on a new name I proposed the name LinuxBoot and that
seems to work for people. So we use the name LinuxBoot not linuxbios.

There are two uses of LinuxBoot today, one is Trammell's HEADS/Linuxboot
work and the other is our NERF work, where NERF is LinuxBoot + u-root.

There is a linuxboot mailing list already, as well as a github.com/linuxboot
organization. We'll keep the source on github and we will probably continue
to use github for our web presence as well, as we do for u-root with
u-root.tk.

As I said in my talk at ELC, coreboot is the preferred path for opening up
firmware when that is possible. But LinuxBoot has an important role to play
now for several organizations where coreboot will not be used.

And, as Paul mentions, I see LinuxBoot as useful both on coreboot (replace
ramstage with Linux) and as a replacement for UEFI (since UEFI is
essentially a ramstage) or even where we replace a large part of UEFI with
Linux, but retain the DxeCore. There are many possible ways to implement
LinuxBoot.

Thanks Paul!

ron
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