Google Adds Coreboot Support For "Butterfly"

Google continues to show commitment to supporting Coreboot as a viable alternative to traditional BIOS / UEFI. The latest work that comes via the Googleplex is support for the "Butterfly", or known to the masses as the HP Pavilion Chromebook.

Recently there's been a lot of activity within Coreboot by Google, as illustrated at Phoronix within Google Pushes "Project PIANO" Into Coreboot and Google Continues Working A Lot On Coreboot. The search giant is one of the biggest backers of Coreboot through their employing of several of the key (and original) Coreboot developers. Google loves Coreboot for being able to make their Chromebooks boot very fast while being secure and open-source.

Supporting the HP Pavilion "Butterfly" Chromebook is quite a big commit. As part of this Butterfly enablement, Coreboot support was added for the ENE KB3940Q embedded controller running on Quanta's firmware.

The HP Pavilion Chromebook is a $330 (USD) laptop with a 14-inch display, Intel 847 dual-core 1.1GHz processor, 16GB SSD, 2GB of RAM, and a rated battery life up to four hours and fifteen minutes. When it comes to Google Chromebooks, my current favorite is the Samsung Series 5 Chromebook due to its use of the Exynos 5 Dual ARM SoC that leverages an ARM Cortex-A15 processor for exciting levels of performance.