Google Is One Of The Biggest Backers Of Coreboot

Last week I pointed out how Google is contributing a lot to Coreboot since they are enjoying this open-source BIOS/UEFI because they can ship it on Chrome OS devices for allowing very fast boot times, great customization possibilities, and good security with having full source access. In this article are some development statistics surrounding Coreboot to show the most prolific contributors, the pace of development, and other traits for this open-source project formerly known as LinuxBIOS.

When running GitStats on the Coreboot Git repository, there's data going back to 14 April 2003. For the past decade, there's been Git activity on 55% of the days. The Git repository is home now to 9,929 files with a total line count of 2,467,628 lines of code. In nearly ten years, there's been 7,398 commits (as of yesterday) from 253 contributors.

The busiest year for Coreboot was in 2010 when they had 1,237 commits. Last year they came up shy of this amount with a total of 1,221 commits that introduced 832,469 lines of code while removing 101,530 lines of code. The year prior, 2011, there were only 875 commits but they had 1,371,610 lines of code.

The most prolific committer to Coreboot is Stefan Reinauer with 1,648 commits -- more than 1,000 commits on top of the second busiest contributor, Uwe Hermann. Stefan Reinauer has commit history with Coreboot/LinuxBIOS going back to 2003 and has been employed with Google since 2010. His job description at Google is to work on "[a] lightning fast boot experience with coreboot on ChromeOS devices." Stefan Reinauer was one of the original Coreboot/LinuxBIOS developers. Ronald Minnich is another one of the original Coreboot developers, a top Coreboot developer, and is also now employed by Google.

In addition to leading on the commit count front, Reinauer has added the most lines of code to Coreboot.

Aside from Google/Chromium developers, AMD and Sage Engineering are also big contributors to Coreboot. The now-defunct Coresystems, where Stefan Reinauer was their CEO, also still represents one of the domains with the most contributions.

Any day now there should be more than 10,000 files making up Coreboot -- right now they're at 9,929.

In 2013 there should be more than 2.5 million lines of code making up Coreboot -- right now it's at 2,467,628.

While Google really is enjoying Coreboot due to its fast boot speeds and other benefits, there isn't much consumer hardware using this open-source BIOS/UEFI system. AMD continues to back Coreboot and there's some server vendors like Tyan and Super Micro that are fond of Coreboot and support it to some extent, but there isn't much for consumer hardware.

The list of chipsets and devices known to work with Coreboot can be found on the Coreboot.org Wiki.