AMD Provides Fusion Support For Coreboot 71
An anonymous reader writes "AMD has done a big code drop providing Fusion support for Coreboot, the project that once was called LinuxBIOS for providing an open source BIOS implementation."
A lack of vendor support has long made the task of the coreboot developers difficult. Support for what is slated to be a common chipset is pretty encouraging, and will hopefully make it easier to run an entirely Free Software system for diehards like RMS.
Wait! (Score:3, Insightful)
What's this? A Phoronix article where I _don't_ have to click through eleven other articles to find the source?
Other than that: Hopefully this will make coreboot's future brighter, by a lot.
Speed (Score:3)
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Open source altruism aside, i want a stable, flexible, fast-booting BIOS. The standard BIOS that comes with most motherboards is awful, and is frequently missing important features.
What's so wrong with your motherboard's BIOS? What features is it missing?
What brand and model motherboard do you have? I'm predicting it's not an Asus board, because Asus has awesome BIOSes.
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Often laptops require upgrading because consumers like the latest shiny processor/screen/form factor and not because they aren't suitable for using. In my experience, laptops often get handed down when they're "upgraded" to a newer model and I, for one, try to avoid manufacturers that don't treat t
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Go ask anyone who bought a laptop where the CPU supports Intel VT but the laptop vendor has completly disabled and locked out the support in the BIOS, preventing you from using it.
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It's all a shame. All of that just to squeeze a little bit more cash out. I fucking hate businesspeople*
* most. there are the rare exceptions
Collusion only works with 100% participation. (Score:1)
Re:Speed (Score:4, Insightful)
I've got a Jetway mini-ITX, and its BIOS/ACPI is so FUBAR that they managed to break *all* power management stuff along with access to the temperature sensor and fan speed controls. Y'know, the main reasons for buying a low-speed mini-ITX in the first place.
And unlike all other mobo manufacturers I've used (Asus is good, and so is Gigabyte), this one seems to never, ever put out updates to fix their broken firmware, let alone add features to it.
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Funny, I've used their Atom boards to build lots of firewall devices. The BIOS has always worked exactly as expected for me.
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Really? I have an Asus board and although it has lots of features, it takes longer to POST than it does for Win7 to boot from an SSD harddrive. When I go into setup, it doesn't look much different than the BIOS of twenty years ago. I had a board back around '96 which gave me a pseudo WIMP environment. For 2010 when I bought the board, this is poor.
Maybe Asus have awesome BIOS's compared to most other manufacturers, but it is still a turd.
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> What's so wrong with your motherboard's BIOS?
I am guessing that what the parent real wants is what I would like: the ability to boot directly into the OS (esp. Linux), and not via a 2 stage boot via the BIOS.
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So, I like the BIOS on my two ASUS motherboards, although they are lacking in one area - speed.
The problem is that all the various RAID controllers each add their own startup delay with their own keyboard shortcuts. My server has two of them, so it takes something like 10 seconds before GRUB launches, and that is with memory scan disabled. I'm not even using any of the RAID features in the BIOS - I'm just using the controllers to attach normal drives.
A second here and a second there and 5 vendor display s
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Oh, and that CR-48 boot time includes the use of TPM trusted-boot and drive encryption... Granted, the flash also helps quite a bit there, but I'm sure several people spent a month staring at bootchart to get it polished.
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I have a computer with an Intel 945GNT. The chipset supports the Core 2 processors, but the BIOS only supports the Socket 775 Pentium 4, Pentium D, and the associated Celerons. Dropping in one of the last generation Core 2 Duos could be a cheap and huge boost to that machine, if the board would take it.
As for Asus, their stuff is junk. I had a board (that was actually part of one of their barebones kits) where you couldn't manually set the memory speed, and it detected the speed of the installed memory w
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I don't know about anyone else but I'm pissed that Gateway turned off AMD-V in the Athlon 64 L110 in my netbook. The chipset (R690M) is supported by coreboot, so one way I may prowl for JTAG so I can start testing coreboot images. Gateway tells me I can open a paid support ticket to get BIOS with AMD-V, but god knows how many hours it would take. If I still worked for an enterprise that used them I would just claim it was owned by the business and maybe get help that way but it's been a while. Coreboot is m
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Interesting. Most BIOS I've seen have had too many features, leading to the slow booting that you noted.
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In their implementation it is slow indeed,
However coreboot has shown that all hardware can be booted in under 1 seconds, that includes your ethernet and or wireless. That's pretty awesome for almost instant on systems like htpc's and such which would have a very tiny POST boot with trimmed linux. We're talking about 5 seconds till a machine is ready.
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That's impressive for sure! But what about hitting the magic button on the keyboard to tell the BIOS that you want to change some settings? That doesn't leave much time at all.
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You could do what some BIOSes already do, which is hold down a key. Just hold down the key as you turn the computer on and it would go into the settings menu.
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The other option I've seen is a switch or jumper on the board itself that enables the pause-n-prompt - without that set, it skips right past that.
That sure wasted me some time when I was trying to figure what the hell was going on - but after I saw it, I thought it was ingenious.
Wish I could remember what hardware I saw that on.
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efi is just a more complicated and closed way to do bios.
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ISA ports may not be on your board, but the ISA bus is still in use!!
For instance, all of my server's hardware monitoring systems are talked through via ISA... and this server is very recent/modern.
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EFI
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Firmware_Interface [wikipedia.org]
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EFI
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Firmware_Interface [wikipedia.org]
EFI is a (get this) BIOS!
BIOS isn't just 4 capital letters - those letters MEAN something.
EFI is a BIOS.
It is not the same BIOS as the one IBM developed and Compaq stole, but it is still a BIOS.
People who talk about (U)EFI only do so because Steve Jobs name dropped in a press conference a couple years ago.
The actual useful technical merits of (U)EFI over BIOS are slim.
Preboot shit simply doesn't need 64 bit processing or access to the full memory space.
Preboot shit is shit you want to be as minimal as possi
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My computer does not need Electronic Fuel Injection. Last thing I need is my computer to use gas.
Damn oil companies screwing with computers now!
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EFI [wikipedia.org] can replace the BIOS, but the operating system must support it. The Intel based Macs are famous for being some of the first machines that shipped with EFI in place of a BIOS. If you want to dual boot, Boot Camp actually fakes* a BIOS on top of EFI to allow other operating systems (like Windows XP) to install.
* Note: I do not know exactly how this is done, others might want to offer some insight.
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Apple was hardly the first. HP has had them since 2000 on their Itanium systems. I read somewhere that Gateway shipped a few x86 computers with EFI back around that time too, although they added BIOS compatibility so that Windows could boot.
But regardless of all that, what does it matter what type of firmware a computer runs? It's the manufacturers who dictate what the end-user is allowed to access (short of user hacking of course)
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PCs are incredibly complex, and this causes the otherwise simple boot code to be complex. Supporting outdated 16-bit modes and other backwards compatibility, being required to boot up and provide initial drivers and support for most systems, providing OS functions in case the real OS is lazy, keeping backwards compatibility with bugs, providing a simple user interface to do all the configuration, network booting support, and so on. There's a lot that can go wrong and undoubtedly tons of legacy firmware.
One
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What about FreeDOS and Contiki?
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When was the last time you really needed to run DOS, outside of a BIOS update? If you're one of the rare ones that has a reason - do you really have a reason, or are you just too lazy/cheap to upgrade/migrate from your early 1990s systems?
Contiki... sounds like niche software that would be better suited to a non-PC embedded system. If you want to run that on a PC, you're probably doing something silly.
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Whoosh.
It was a joke.
But let me ask you a question. Why replace a dos app that works? Really if a tool works why replace it?
And second. Contiki on a PC. Well maybe for development?
I am sure that Contiki would get ported and there will always be something that will run Freedos but really just because something is outside of your realm of experience doesn't make it silly.
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True, but this exact same design process made things so cheap that people like you and me can actually own something so powerful at home.
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True. I wonder just how fast and effecent you could make something like the Atom if you dropped all the old odds and ends that it has to support. Things like 8087, MMX, 286 instructions, and just had it support 64bit mode.
Yes a lot of stuff would not run anymore but for say the mobile market and embedded it could be a real winner.
Why not then just revive the DEC Alpha (Score:1)
Or some other "architecturally pure" design?? :)
Though I kind of agree with you, keep 32bit mode.
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The 32bit mode is short of GP registers. But keeping it as a compromise solution for a while might be good. Just drop the 8087, MMX, and all the 16bit and segment crap.
The reason for keeping the 86-64 ISA is simple. Code you compile for the 64bit only chip will work just fine and dandy on the current CPUs we have now.
But Yea I would love to see the Alpha back but that will not give you the easy compatibility.
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Intel has such a platform, I think it was called Pine Trail or something. It was an Atom CPU that had no PCI bus and was designed for mobile applications. It can boot Linux and doe
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I meant, if you're running Android and having to do all sorts of tricks to save power, you might as well just save the complexity and use an ARM processor anyhow...
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Software programmers can design hardware worth shit. So I guess we are even.
Plus BIOS is written in a secret programming language called assembler. Something that it seems that most programmers can't do anymore.
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Generated assembly, sure. I doubt most is done in raw assembler these days.
Also a smart move. (Score:3)
I think even just the willingness to contribute something to an open BIOS implementation is very commendable.
Additionally, it could be a smart move for AMD. A FOSS BIOS could give them a competitive advantage in sales, as the only/first manufacturer of modern high-end chipsets enabling personal computer products where a full code audit or replacement with user-trusted secure code would be practical.
Compare this to Intel, which includes support for remote administration in the chips, BIOS, and network adapt
Fusion support (Score:2)
Thanks..could make a unified boot system too (Score:1)
Thanks, AMD (Score:4, Insightful)
That's very nice. Of course, there's more to motherboard support than the chipset and CPU, but they are two major hurdles.
enough with the flamebaits, ok? (Score:1)
>will hopefully make it easier to run an entirely Free Software system for diehards like RMS.
Whut? you do NOT have to be a "diehard like RMS" to want a system that boots nearly instantly, or a system that allows you to set default power management values before the OS comes up, or a system that makes bios updates via network easy (clusters comes to mind), or make BIOS changes without a monitor hooked up etc etc.
If you bothered to look at the technical reasons to run Coreboot rather than trying to sneak i
Not just for "diehards like RMS"; for you! (Score:3)
It may come as a surprise, but right now, someone else owns your entire platform. The BIOS/EFI do not merely boot the system, they also provide run time services in the form of System Management Mode [wikipedia.org].
That's right, your system is running black box code at runtime. The TPM already lives there, and if you are "lucky", the future malware will be limited to DRM which can't be circumvented, or systems that only run signed code. The implications for security are staggering, and considering that modern systems even have access to your network from this code, the opportunity for abuse is truly frightening. (How trivial would it be for your government--or the manufacturers in China--to install backdoors, remote key logging facilities, or root kits and such?)
Support Coreboot, so that we may retain control of our own systems. Many thanks to its authors for their persistence, and AMD for their generous contributions. For further information, there was also an interesting google talk [youtube.com] a while back.
Remote management (Score:2)
Screw the paranoia and extremist ideology... I WANT REMOTE MANAGEMENT, DAMMIT.
Maybe 15 years ago, x86 was the red-headed step child... the ONE hardware platform without out-of-band management built-in. Every other platform out there redirected the IO on boot-up to the first serial port, at least if it didn't detect a keyboard plugged-in. And you know what? You could configure every damn option the hardware had, at that first firmware command-prompt, over the serial port. Hell, I ran numerous servers t
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Are you suggesting every x86 system built has AMT support? If not, you've completely missed my point.