Coreboot Finally Takes The Interest Of OEMs

[Nogotheg]

Windows 8

How exactly does coreboot boot other payloads? Does it show some "BIOS-interface" to the bootloaders/kernels?

Will it be able to boot f.ex. Windows 8 which is rumoured to only support UEFI? Can coreboot simply fake that or are there other possibilities?

[RealNC]

i think linux users don't use coreboot because they just simply don't care.

That's probably the common reason, but don't forget that people don't want to break their boards by flashing it with something that might not work.

[89c51]

reading some recent and older rants about acpi and stuff would it be possible for someone to implement a new ACPI replacement system in coreboot that would eliminate all the disadvantages/problems of ACPI?????

[V!NCENT]

reading some recent and older rants about acpi and stuff would it be possible for someone to implement a new ACPI replacement system in coreboot that would eliminate all the disadvantages/problems of ACPI?????

Those rants are from back in the day when ACPI was dealt with in the BIOS, implementing the virtual machine in assembly, running alongside the OS and causing a 5% performance hit. Today ACPI lives in the Linux kernel itself.

Windows however seems to wage battles with it inside kernelspace with its own power management module.

And Windows 8 is bootable with the Windows 8 bootloader, which can be booted by GRUB2, which can be a Coreboot payload (yeah...).

[alazyworkaholic]

Overheating protection, latency adjustment, Overclocking etc?

I'd happily replace my BIOS if there's any chance it would fix my desktops boot & suspend problems.
I have a Gigabyte 780G motherboard with a Phenom II 945; fortunately it has a backup bios chip. It has a 'sideport' 128 MB ram for the onboard graphics, but I'm using an ATI 4670 + Catalyst.
I have to use Gigabyte's Beta BIOS for the AM3 CPU to work. I'm not sure if it's related, but half the time the desktop hangs at Ubuntu's purple loading screen, & half the time I try to suspend it hangs with a black screen. Not sure if it's BIOS or USB.

The one thing I'd really like to know about coreboot is does it have any of the bells & whistles of proprietary BIOSes like setting RAM latencies, turning on/off extra fans, CPU PWM fan control, or especially - a warning sound if the CPU temp rises too far, & shutdown if a critical limit is exceeded? If it doesn't have those things, then coreboot seems to be very good at very little.

[srg_13]

Will it be able to boot f.ex. Windows 8 which is rumoured to only support UEFI? Can coreboot simply fake that or are there other possibilities?

Why would Windows 8 only support Macs, some servers and the small percentage of computers (probably less than 10 or 20%) that support UEFI?

That makes about as much sense as the rumours a few years ago that Windows 7 would only support x86_64.

[89c51]

Those rants are from back in the day when ACPI was dealt with in the BIOS, implementing the virtual machine in assembly, running alongside the OS and causing a 5% performance hit. Today ACPI lives in the Linux kernel itself.

Windows however seems to wage battles with it inside kernelspace with its own power management module.

And Windows 8 is bootable with the Windows 8 bootloader, which can be booted by GRUB2, which can be a Coreboot payload (yeah...).

i seem to recall that it was matthew garrett that was ranting about Acpi efi uefi etc recently hence my question.

probably since its OS someone can implement a better solution to various problems caused by the above

[cstutts]

I was a LinuxBIOS user

It was fantastic for embedded x86 use: custom Pentium-III board without VGA, running a non-Windows OS. For a board designer of a product with a production run in the hundreds, it would have cost an outrageous amount of money simply to obtain a BIOS or BIOS source. $50K just for firmware, royalties, NDAs: what a nightmare. All for code whose job is to turn RAM on, setup the PCI device tree, and jump to the 32-bit, BIOS-services-unaware, OS. And of course we had a $10K JTAG debugger with which to debug things.

Without that debugger and JTAG connector at the processor, and without support for your chipset and processor in the coreboot source (a very very big problem), coreboot is useless to you. Intel cares about customers who buy millions of chips, so it does not freely provide the info needed to bring up one of its motherboards from scratch. Hell, sign an NDA with Intel and you _still_ don't get the info! AMD is hungrier and less picky.

For a 2nd embedded x86 project (Atom Z530+ the infamous Poulsbo chip), coreboot support didn't exist, so we bought the desktop BIOS with the same int 10h as in 1981 and with EFI ... something. (What the hell is EFI good for if the BIOS already has the old IBM AT functionality?)

For ACPI low power sleep/hibernate stuff, you need correct BIOS support; Linux relies on the BIOS to do the chip-specific stuff. Does coreboot do that?

On the other hand, for proper VGA resurrection after ACPI sleep, coreboot can do no worse than Awards BIOS for Atom netbooks. Generally speaking you need a decent video driver to get your screen back after a sleep, which for Poulsbo/GMA 500 existed for Windows only.

[DeepDayze]

when i try to enter bios setup my monitor goes out of sync. wonderful. and it's a classic bios i'm using here, designed for that very motherboard.

coreboot supports all the components my mainboard has, but that doesn't mean it's supported. so i cannot use it yet, at least not without a backup bios chip (and dual bios solution doesn't work here)

This is true as there may be 2 different motherboards that have the exact same chipsets as well as the same support chips and support the exact same CPU's but there are enough differences at the microcode level that coreboot may work on one but not the other.

Coreboot seems to work on many old motherboards, even my old ASUS P2B

[chithanh]

Intel cares about customers who buy millions of chips, so it does not freely provide the info needed to bring up one of its motherboards from scratch.

I think Intel 945/Atom support has been contributed by third parties. Other than that, the comments on the coreboot mailing list seem to confirm that AMD cares much more about coreboot customers than Intel.

For ACPI low power sleep/hibernate stuff, you need correct BIOS support; Linux relies on the BIOS to do the chip-specific stuff. Does coreboot do that?

Coreboot has code for suspend/resume support on SB700+. http://tracker.coreboot.org/trac/cor...changeset/6173