Coreboot Finally Takes The Interest Of OEMs

[Drago]

Actually SMM mode runs, alongside with the OS. I monitors system temperature, controls the fan speed, draws OSD on your laptop volume control, shutdowns the system when it overheats, sends a scanout of you RAM to NSA, etc.

PS: viva la larger edit limit

[yesterday]

i think linux users don't use coreboot because they just simply don't care. first of all, it isn't hard to program your own bios chip if you know the language. the hardware to program eeprom and rom chips are relatively cheap. but also, if you buy a GOOD motherboard, you don't really need something like coreboot. why would i care to use an open source product when i'm forced to pay for the bios my mobo comes with and when that bios is proven to work great and allow me to utilize my hardware however i want? thats like saying you buy a leather chair and decide to put a pleather (plastic fake leather) cover over it. why bother buying something and completely change the intention of it?

i would find coreboot to be particularly useful for OEM retail computers or cheap mobos that don't give you any options, but generally i'd find it a waste of time.

1) It's impossible to know if you are buying a "good motherboard". Most reviews don't cover everything about a motherboard, and you don't know what problems will come up you run the thing

2) There are PLENTY of boards released with bugs, and since manufacturers release so many boards, the support for boards is just pathetic. I have a mid-range board from ASUS that is two years old with some bugs that will never be fixed. They are not game breaking, but it is still a pain

3) The same arguments were once made about the open source code. "Most people don't need a free software operating system because proprietary Unix works just fine"

4) Coreboot is simpler, quicker, and more transparent. I certainly prefer a motherboard with a complete coreboot implementation than one with BIOS. Hopefully having a manufacturer like Gigabyte means that my chances of owning such a board will increase

[alazyworkaholic]

Configuration

Plz, what does coreboot offer in terms of configuring the motherboard's bells & whistles? Switch between integrated or discrete graphics at boot, amount of memory allocated to IGP, RAM settings, etc?

[yesterday]

Obviously the goal of coreboot is to implement all the bells and whistles.

[V!NCENT]

Coreboot asks the Eeprom on your RAM module for the timings through the CPU->northbridge->southbridge->philips audio bus->RAM 'firmware' so you'll automatically get the correct settings.

And if overclocking was a good idea then Intel and AMD would have delivered their Cores and Phenoms OC'ed a long time ago. Competition is fierce.

The OS kernel ahould manage clocking and multiple GPU's, because the HDD/SSD is the real bottleneck at booting anyway (combined with software of course).

Now, I'd love to get replace my phenom board. The problem is that there is no Phenom bord, supported by Coreboot. (See all suported motherboards on the Coreboot wiki)

[deanjo]

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.

Almost every new motherboard out there now utilizes UEFI (take a look at SB or BD motherboards that are coming out). The BIOS is finally a legacy product and what probably finally made that happen was the 2+ TB harddrives for which there is no easy way of supporting them as a bootable device in a traditional BIOS setup.

[JanC]

One of the important advantages of Coreboot is that it can load & boot the OS much faster than any PC BIOS or (U)EFI systems, e.g. it doesn't have to scan for boot devices (or only do that when a particular key is pressed or switch is closed), load configs, etc.

Oh, and some ChromeOS netbooks will become available in Q3/Q4, coincidence?

[Kivada]

And if overclocking was a good idea then Intel and AMD would have delivered their Cores and Phenoms OC'ed a long time ago. Competition is fierce.

Proof of that? AMD and Intel have been selling parts that they fully expect you to OC for YEARS now, never heard of an AMD FX or Black Edition? Hell, AMD CPUs can even have factory deactivated cores renabled. Granted, you shouldn't expect an OC, but thats what 99% of the CPU models already are, they're all the top end part binned to different price point, almost all of them can reach the speed of the fastest clocked parts of the same base design. Some can even far exceed the rated speeds of the fastest parts, they only need better then bog standard power circuitry and cooling to do so.

Overclocking of things like the RAM is also going to be of some importance to those getting AMD's new Fusion parts, since they are pairing a relatively fast GPU to the same ram bus as the rest of the system those looking to get better gaming results will want to tweak the ram speed and timings to feed the bandwidth starved GPU. It's something you see all the time with the lower end cards, where to cut costs you see a jumble of cards based on the same GPU core with any combination of GDDR1/2/3/5* and/or 64/128-bit bus, the cards with the same speed core but with faster/wider memory bandwidth destroys those with slower RAM since the GPU core isn't sitting around waiting for the next frame to load.

*GDDR4 was only slightly faster then GDDR3, was never popular, only being used in a handful of AMD's top end X19 and HD2/3 cards, as far as I've seen, no Nvidia cards ever used GDDR4.

[chithanh]

The BIOS is finally a legacy product and what probably finally made that happen was the 2+ TB harddrives for which there is no easy way of supporting them as a bootable device in a traditional BIOS setup.

That is often claimed and indeed Microsoft does not support such a configuration, but it is wrong.
As long as the BIOS supports LBA48 properly, there are no limitations to booting drives >2TB. The limitation is only in the MBR partitioning scheme. Both GRUB 2 and syslinux can boot from GPT partitioned media on BIOS based systems.

[deanjo]

That is often claimed and indeed Microsoft does not support such a configuration, but it is wrong.
As long as the BIOS supports LBA48 properly, there are no limitations to booting drives >2TB. The limitation is only in the MBR partitioning scheme. Both GRUB 2 and syslinux can boot from GPT partitioned media on BIOS based systems.

The fact that MS doesn't support such a configuration makes the statement actually right considering that is the operating system that a vast majority of the world runs. Motherboard manufacturers are not going to continue building motherboards that cannot take full advantage of the hardware out there on the worlds most common operating system.