At Just Over One Year Old, LinuxBoot Continues Making Inroads At Facebook & Elsewhere

It was just at the end of January last year when the Linux Foundation announced LinuxBoot to replace some firmware with the Linux kernel as another step for freeing traditionally proprietary firmware mostly on server hardware. LinuxBoot does continue making advanced at least on server class hardware and shows a lot of potential for 2019.

Andrea Barberio and David Hendricks of Facebook presented at FOSDEM 2019 last week on the efforts around LinuxBoot as well as U-Root and Coreboot for freeing hardware down to the lowest levels. LinuxBoot continues to be developed by Facebook as well as Google and other organizations wanted an open and trusted hardware initialization process.

Most of the LinuxBoot supported motherboards at this stage are various Open Compute nodes but there is also the Dell R630 and Intel S2600WF boards that can handle this Linux-on-firmware implementation. LinuxBoot continues to work with UEFI as well as a Coreboot payload.

Those that haven't explored LinuxBoot in a while can see the latest code on GitHub while the project site is LinuxBoot.org. For those curious about Facebook's use of open-source firmware, the FOSDEM 2019 presentation can be viewed here (WebM).

Speaking of open-source firmware, hopefully soon we'll hear something more on Intel potentially open-sourcing the FSP under the leadership of Raja Koduri.