Welcome to coreboot

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The wiki is being retired!

Documentation is now handled by the same processes we use for code: Add something to the Documentation/ directory in the coreboot repo, and it will be rendered to https://doc.coreboot.org/. Contributions welcome!

Welcome to the LinuxBIOS homepage

LinuxBIOS Summit Oct. 11-13, Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA. See Current events for information. Richard Bruner, AMD Fellow, will be a featured speaker. We have a number of interesting speakers lined up, and will be describing new developments, such as the use of Linux Kconfig for LinuxBIOS configuration. Hope too see you there!

Here's his talk:

This should whet your appetite for the 3-day linuxbios summit Oct. 11, 2005 in santa fe!

For more information, http://lacsi.rice.edu/symposium/


Title: AMD's Roadmap for Free Firmware (as in Beer)

Speaker: Rich Brunner, AMD Fellow

Abstract: This will be a discussion of the upcoming AMD Processor roadmap, AMD plans for supporting LinuxBIOS, and AMD's directions for the future of firmware.

Speaker BIO:

Richard A. Brunner is the Software Architect for Advanced Micro Devices' AMD64 Architecture. He is an AMD fellow and is responsible for driving the technical direction of AMD's AMD64 software strategy for operating systems, device drivers, compilers, libraries, OS/firmware interaction, performance optimizations, and 3rd party tools. Richard led AMD's initial involvement into the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) forum.

Richard holds a Masters of Science degree in Computer Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from Case Western Reserve University. He holds patents in computer architecture and has presented extensively including Hot Chips, Siggraph, WinHec, Linux Kernel Summit, Linux World, Ottawa Linux Symposium.


LinuxBIOS is a Free Software project aimed at replacing the normal BIOS with a little bit of hardware initialization and a compressed Linux kernel that can be booted from a cold start. The project was started as part of clustering research work in the Cluster Reseach Lab at the Advanced Computing Laboratory at Los Alamos National Laboratory. The primary motivation behind the project was the desire to have the operating system gain control of a cluster node from power on. Other beneficial consequences of using LinuxBIOS include needing only two working motors to boot (cpu fan and power supply), fast boot times (current fastest is 3 seconds), and freedom from proprietary (buggy) BIOS code, to name a few. These secondary benefits are numerous and have helped gain support from many vendors in both the high performance computing as well as embedded computing markets.

Note that, on newer systems, there need be no moving parts at all. At LANL, we are building a new 'no moving parts' 16-node cluster to demonstrate this capability. The cluster will fit in a toolbox, run from a battery, boot in 10 seconds, and be controlled from your laptop (which, sadly, will still have a few moving parts).