Yabits: A New UEFI Coreboot Payload Alternative To TianoCore & Closed-Source Blobs

Yabits was announced last month at the OSFC 2018 conference in Erlangen, Germany. Yabits is a lighter-weight alternative to the open-source TianoCore UEFI implementation and other commonly used proprietary UEFI implementations by motherboard vendors.

Yabits is "Yet another UEFI coreboot payload" and aims to deliver the same UEFI x86_64 booting capabilities as TianoCore but with a much smaller code-base for environments like embedded systems and the cloud.

This Coreboot payload is much simpler than TianoCore and is based on the UEFI code of the Unix-like Minoca OS. Minoca OS is the lightweight OS intended for embedded systems while Yabits ports this UEFI code for use as a Coreboot payload. So far though it's quite basic with for instance only supporting IDE and AHCI device drivers.

Yabits has been found to be about twice as fast as the default UEFI implementation on a Lenovo ThinkPad X230, boot 9x faster with QEMU over OVMF, and binaries are about 10x smaller than TianoCore.

Future plans for Yabits are ARM support, Secure Boot capabilities, Graphical Output Protocol handling, and the ability to boot Windows.

Those wishing to learn more can find the presentation video embedded below as well as checking out the PDF slide deck.