> ron minnich wrote (ao): >> There's more and more interest in the last two years in coreboot. >> Customers really want it. >> >> It's just that PC vendors are worried about providing it for some >> reason. >> >> PC vendors need to be careful, they're building closed ecosystems now >> around the PC platform. It's quite amazing how much more closed the >> PC platform is than it was in 1994 or even 1999. >> >> Closed ecosystems die. >> >> Here at linuxcon and other recent conferences, all the real >> innovation and cool stuff is ARM-based. PCs are those big, >> expensive, hot, closed things that you're not allowed to hack. >> Really wonderful stuff being done on OMAP 35.
Sander wrote: > Pardon my ignorance, but there is no Coreboot for ARM based hardware > AFAICS? > > On the OpenMoko Freerunner one boots with 'u-boot'. U-boot is a > bootloader, and as such not comparable with Coreboot I think. Does ARM > have BIOS firmware at all? I've googled but failed to find the answer. Das U-Boot is directly comparable to coreboot. U-Boot is almost always used on non-x86 architectures, but it does a similar sort of hardware initialization on those architectures that coreboot does on x86 architectures. U-Boot does not have a payload structure like coreboot, but U-Boot can load executables (usually an operating system) and U-Boot scripts. U-Boot has a TCP/IP stack and USB stack, a system of drivers, maintains a non-volatile set of environment variables, etc. It is a reasonably well designed system that is more often than not used as a bootloader with full boot device initialization for non-x86 architectures. I suggest that coreboot designers look at how U-Boot is designed, and conversely U-Boot designers look at how coreboot is designed. I know that some have already done this. Perhaps both projects have done some things better than the other and can share ideas and even higher level architecture independent code. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Das_U-Boot Sincerely, Ken Fuchs -- coreboot mailing list: [email protected] http://www.coreboot.org/mailman/listinfo/coreboot
