[coreboot] Coreboot on ARM? (was: Re: Coreboot or UEFI, who will be the winner.)

Peter Stuge peter at stuge.se
Tue Sep 29 13:55:51 CEST 2009


Sander wrote:
> On the OpenMoko Freerunner one boots with 'u-boot'.

Or Qi: http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Qi


> Does ARM have BIOS firmware at all?

No. BIOS is strictly a PC thing. ARM does have firmware to boot the
system, but it can not be called BIOS.

But please note that coreboot is not a BIOS. coreboot does only
hardware initialization. After coreboot follows another component
which takes over, and can do whatever it wants. This component is
called the payload.

There are bootloader payloads with drivers for hard drives, CD-ROMs
and network cards. The Linux kernel can be used as payload, and a few
other operating system kernels as well. There is also a BIOS payload,
which is called SeaBIOS. Please see http://www.coreboot.org/Payloads
for more information. Combining coreboot with SeaBIOS gets you an
open source version of a legacy BIOS. Combining coreboot with
something else gets you a whole new way of booting PCs.


Kind regards

//Peter




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