Coreboot Now Works On The Older MacBook 1,1 Too

[WorBlux]

So... what exactly is the point of a BIOS or UEFI, aside from a graphical way to configure your hardware? Or is that literally the only point...? I thought the BIOS/UEFI was the standards-based implementations of hardware initialization :/
(A direct handoff to GRUB would make my computer boot about 8 seconds faster)

I think the implementation is anything but standard, especially in BIOS every vendor does their own thing. . What they do it provide API's of last resort. UEFI in addition to providing runtime services offers a host of boot-time services. So what they give you is a layer of drivers (usually poorly implemented) in case the kernel you run doesn't have more specific drivers for the hardware.

[curaga]

I disagree Linux can overclock by probing and changing MSR's. It's not necessarily easy but it's a UI rather than driver limitation.

SeaBIOS can boot from optical ATAPI optical drives

Oh, I wasn't up to date on SeaBIOS, thanks. Now only OC code and coreboot can conquer the world (well, if there were more than a couple fully supported mobos instead of a hundred 75% working).

[Luke]

Overclocking would be better handled from the OS than from Coreboot

It's pretty much only overclocking and boot device selection nowadays. Neither coreboot nor linux have OC code, and no payload can boot from cd/floppy yet. I believe the payloads do support USB and PXE chainloading.

Given the small number of northbridges in chipsets and small number of X86 CPUs relative to the number of total motherboard configurations, plus the Coreboot principle of fast handoff, it seems to me that getting full control of OC from Linix would be the best fix for this situation.

Coreboot support for my boards combined with good AMD CPU and DRAM overclocking from Linux (not the BIOS), with the ability to boot from USB or hard drive(Seabios?) would put Coreboot in my machines. My older Phenom II machines are "close but no cigar" on this question right now. If I needed a Coreboot machine immediately for Snowden-level work I would have to start with an off the shelf Chromebook and reflash with vanilla Coreboot.

There is the old "TurionPowerControl" package for overclocking from Linux, I have it but it only supports my phenom machines, not Bulldozer as far as I can tell. At any rate I don't see base clock or full DRAM controls in it. Ideally there would be a single API that a variety of such programs would write to as backends for various boards, plus one or more GUI packages using that API to run them, ideally from the system tray.

A really good OS level overclocking control would have one big advantage over every OS BIOS I have ever tried: being able to raise the voltage only to the highest P state and keep it down or even undervolt in lower power states. I would want to replace the highest p-state only with my overclocked profile, except that the DRAM would probably have to stay overclocked and overvolted fulltime. There is another alternative: using a script controlling a good OS level overclocking program (able to control DRAM as well as CPU) to select between the normal P states and a simgle locked "maxperf" overclocked level that would be used only for things like gaming and video rendering. No BIOS can do that.

For web surfing I would want to be able to disable 3 of the 4 Bulldozer modules, undervolt on stock clocks, and use the "conservative" governor, for video rendering run all 4 modules (8 cores) at maximum stable clocks, for gaming run one module only at max stable clocks. Overall I would save quite a bit of power. To do this out of BIOS would mean going into setup with every boot.