Why Facebook Loves Open-Source Firmware

With the Open-Source Firmware Conference 2018 videos having been uploaded this week, another one of the interesting videos to watch from this conference was about Facebook's preference for open-source firmware.

David Hendricks and Andrea Barberio of Facebook presented at the OSFC 2018 conference last month in Germany. They talked about Facebook's push towards LinuxBoot, OpenBMC, and open-source firmware in general.

Open-source firmware initiatives like OpenBMC and LinuxBoot are becoming standard for their Open Compute Project (OCP) hardware. They enjoy open-source firmware for greater firmware security, closed firmware being host to an array of potential problems, etc. They prefer a standard open platform for familiarity, a low barrier to entry by their developers, feature parity, and other benefits for their many data centers.

Facebook's current LinuxBoot platform relies on U-Root with Systemboot. Systemboot is their boot-loader Linux distribution that is written in Golang and provides tools for booting whether it be booting from a network, local storage, etc.

The Facebook open-source firmware session video is embedded below or there are also the slides for those short on time.