A Cloud/Hosting Provider Is Using Coreboot On Thousands Of Servers

[starshipeleven]

Would love to see some contributions from Scaleaway.

Did you miss the "Con" called NDA?

Maybe a nice graphical configuration menu?

For what? It has boot menu, and the rest is defined at compile time. It's not like you need to change options.

[Vistaus]

Intel does not publish documentation and blobs to port boards to Coreboot, the only way is to sign an NDA and pay large amounts of $$$ for a support contract to them. Only companies can afford that.

AMD is similar.

But but but... I thought Phoronix users claimed that AMD was the good guy???

[starshipeleven]

But but but... I thought Phoronix users claimed that AMD was the good guy???

Sorry, I meant "Intel forced AMD to do the same against their will".

AMD had opensource AGESA (their low-level initialization blob) up until some point in 2012, but their lawyers were slowing the thing down so much that it was released far too late to be useful for generating revenue (i.e. getting companies to use it to make board firmwares before the hardware itself was 1-2 gens old). You know, they make hardware, they are scared to lose IP or some of their secret sauce if they publish too much info.

So they transitioned to binary AGESA which can be released as soon as possible, but being closed source is impossible to fix if it has issues (like ECC support for the PCEngines APU boards)

Intel never even tried opensourcing their low level blobs, because they are evil or something.

The truth here is that people porting some random board to Coreboot does NOT generate revenue, a decent-sized company deciding to use Coreboot instead of UEFI on their products does.

And as this cloud hosting provider said, Coreboot is still better than UEFI even with blobs, which is more of a testament about how UEFI sucks ass than about Coreboot being anything noteworthy on modern hardware (since it is just a wrapper for low-level blobs).

Which is why I think that LinuxBoot can have a future for companies too (it would be replacing current Coreboot users basically). The blobs it keeps in the firmware are still coming from Intel/AMD, so it should still cut the middlemen UEFI firmware vendors out of the equation, just like Coreboot does.

[cen1]

That's good to hear. Last I looked about 6 months or so ago, Scaleway didn't have that good of a reputation iirc.

I'm fond of these providers:
Hetzner(Germany, dedicated servers with great price/value ratio and reputation, also support dedicated GPUs like GTX 1080 and AMD Ryzen options),
Vultr(KVM, great performance/value, lots of support docs from community, modern/nice management interface, custom ISO support, fast cloud instance spin ups, dedicated instances and dedicated servers, flexible blockstorage),
SSDNodes(best I/O speed that I know of, good value but fairly restricted hardware configs, openVZ or Docker only)

They all do pretty well for network bandwidth speed too iirc, top ranking. Hetzner provides 40TB of bandwidth a month at 1 gigabit, no throttling, cheap to add more too. Plenty of other providers have low bandwidth limits or claim unlimited at a certain speed, small print however throttles it down to dialup, or they don't have affordable(or option at all) to buy additional bandwidth. Not an issue for most people looking for hosts I guess, was for a client supporting a gaming community with mods and a lot of traffic(with Amazon or Azure that'd be like $1k+ a month).

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EDIT: Found in one of my notes this about Scaleway:

> Avoid Scaleway(whom is a brand of Online.net), [this reddit thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/webhosting/..._kinda_sucked/) gives good reason why.

Well that just seems to be false advertising and bad support after looking at it again, the subreddit has plenty of users not happy with Scaleway though: https://www.reddit.com/r/webhosting/...restrict_sr=on

You get what you pay for I guess. I just run a personal server which is not critical so even if there was downtime it wouldn't hurt me. I also did not need any support yet so I can't say anything about that. I can't personaly say if they're any good in performant production grade setups.

[polarathene]

You get what you pay for I guess. I just run a personal server which is not critical so even if there was downtime it wouldn't hurt me. I also did not need any support yet so I can't say anything about that. I can't personaly say if they're any good in performant production grade setups.

If you decide to go to another host, the ones I listed should be fairly good options depending on your needs / experience I quite like Vultr, if you'd like something more mainstream, the closest equivalent/competitor would be DigitalOcean.

AWS/Azure/GoogleCloud also have their perks in services/features, can be much more complicated though and higher cost, better for things like Machine Learning thouogh, especially Google with their TPUs(much faster hardware than GPUs tailored for ML). All 3 tend to have some new user bonus, either offering several hundred in credit for a duration or in AWS case, a year free of their basic cloud instance.