[coreboot] coreboot certified hardware

Patrick Georgi patrick at georgi-clan.de
Mon Oct 4 08:49:17 CEST 2010


Am 04.10.2010 07:33, schrieb Warren Turkal:
> How do I show booting Windows 7 for a board I am working on? If I
> can't because I don't have a license for Windows, should I not be able
> to get the coreboot certification?
That's the difference between a certification that's useful for vendors
and one that's useful for computing enthusiasts.

Whoever produces and sells boards will have some Windows 7 license (and
probably the dev builds to improve testing, as well as the Microsoft
test kits) lying around.

That means, certification would be for different purposes.. a "coreboot
+ Linux" certificate would state that the board is actually useful
beyond freedos (eg. networking works, HPET is around, ACPI is at least
somewhat useful, even if Linux's ACPI interpreter is more forgiving than
perl)

A "coreboot + Windows" certificate could build onto that, stating that
Windows operation was tested, too. Stacking them this way would ensure
that Windows support doesn't break Linux (or any other free OS).

But vendors will (except for some specialty shops or special customer
requests) require the latter - with no regard for the former, except
maybe to assess how much work they'd have to put in/sponsor to make a
coreboot port Windows compatible.

As a side note on "Windows compatible", I'm not 100% sure on this, but I
think the "Designed for Windows" set of certificates by Microsoft handle
firmware behaviour, too.


Patrick




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