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Coreboot Gives Some Love To Purism Librem & Google Tidus

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  • Coreboot Gives Some Love To Purism Librem & Google Tidus

    Phoronix: Coreboot Gives Some Love To Purism Librem & Google Tidus

    Today was another busy day in the Coreboot world for freeing systems of their proprietary BIOS/firmware...

    Phoronix, Linux Hardware Reviews, Linux hardware benchmarks, Linux server benchmarks, Linux benchmarking, Desktop Linux, Linux performance, Open Source graphics, Linux How To, Ubuntu benchmarks, Ubuntu hardware, Phoronix Test Suite

  • #2
    Great. Coreboot seems a lot better way to waste the flash rom space than buggy UEFI BIOS with stupid retarded full color graphics and animations. I really miss the ncurses like interfaces of legacy BIOSes. With Coreboot you could save some space and maybe even store the Linux bzImage there. The ROM flash chips are getting so big. The kernel for a modern Haswell desktop system would be something around 3.5 MB. A lot less for headless servers.

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    • #3
      Originally posted by caligula View Post
      Great. Coreboot seems a lot better way to waste the flash rom space than buggy UEFI BIOS with stupid retarded full color graphics and animations. I really miss the ncurses like interfaces of legacy BIOSes. With Coreboot you could save some space and maybe even store the Linux bzImage there. The ROM flash chips are getting so big. The kernel for a modern Haswell desktop system would be something around 3.5 MB. A lot less for headless servers.
      Absolutely.
      The old 80 x 25 worked fine. It gave you all the controls you needed, it was nice to operate with a few keys and provided some overview.
      I don't need animations of spinning fans and other nonsense or even a whole network stack at firmware level (who really knows what it does? Perfect invisible backdoor during SMM!)

      Coreboot was called LinuxBIOS before since it was one purpose to put the kernel into the flash. Depending on how often you update the kernel it might make more sense to have Seabios or some Bootloader in the flash and the kernel regular as before on your CF card, SSD, HDD. Though it should fit from the size, my kernels are 1.5 ... 3.5 MiB in size. Depending on the machine, but most stuff compiled in, and only a few things as modules which I know will be rarely in use on the very machine. Use -Os to get smaller binaries and with some 3.x kernel you might still get around 1.5 MiB size for a small Geode LX system, and with -O2 about 3 - 4 MiB for a modern multicore system with some hardware in the PCI slots that wants driver plus a few filesystems. That still might just squeeze in aside Coreboot in a flash chip.

      More on topic: Wow, they didn't even have a driver for the EC / SuperIO. Ouch!
      Really, the more I read about that project the more it makes me think they just either had no clue of anything or they were just out to get themselves a Windows gaming suitable laptop funded by FOSS community members that were easy enough to fool by promises of having a freedom laptop.
      Stop TCPA, stupid software patents and corrupt politicians!

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      • #4
        Originally posted by Adarion View Post

        Absolutely.
        The old 80 x 25 worked fine. It gave you all the controls you needed, it was nice to operate with a few keys and provided some overview.
        I don't need animations of spinning fans and other nonsense or even a whole network stack at firmware level (who really knows what it does? Perfect invisible backdoor during SMM!)

        Coreboot was called LinuxBIOS before since it was one purpose to put the kernel into the flash. Depending on how often you update the kernel it might make more sense to have Seabios or some Bootloader in the flash and the kernel regular as before on your CF card, SSD, HDD. Though it should fit from the size, my kernels are 1.5 ... 3.5 MiB in size. Depending on the machine, but most stuff compiled in, and only a few things as modules which I know will be rarely in use on the very machine. Use -Os to get smaller binaries and with some 3.x kernel you might still get around 1.5 MiB size for a small Geode LX system, and with -O2 about 3 - 4 MiB for a modern multicore system with some hardware in the PCI slots that wants driver plus a few filesystems. That still might just squeeze in aside Coreboot in a flash chip.

        More on topic: Wow, they didn't even have a driver for the EC / SuperIO. Ouch!
        Really, the more I read about that project the more it makes me think they just either had no clue of anything or they were just out to get themselves a Windows gaming suitable laptop funded by FOSS community members that were easy enough to fool by promises of having a freedom laptop.
        I'm pretty sure the kernel would fit there. Even cheap routers come with 8-16 MB of ROM flash. Can't be that expensive. In a PC system you might pay $100 to $200 just for the main board. The whole router is cheaper. Some motherboard vendors can even afford a backup flash memory.
        Last edited by caligula; 22 January 2016, 07:19 AM.

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        • #5
          Originally posted by caligula View Post
          The ROM flash chips are getting so big.
          I read this line like it was written in an endearing, motherly tone.

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