Uwe Hermann | A slightly paranoid Debian developer

Here's a nice opportunity for everyone to learn more about coreboot, a Free Software / Open Source firmware/BIOS for x86 PCs.

Ron Minnich, founder of the LinuxBIOS (now called coreboot) project, Peter Stuge of Stuge Konsult, and Stefan Reinauer of coresystems GmbH have given a presentation for the Google Tech Talks series recently. The topic was (of course) coreboot, its history, goals, features and technical details, surrounding tools and libraries such as flashrom and libpayload, as well as an automated test system for running a hardware test-suite upon every checkin in the coreboot repository.

A video of the talk, aptly named coreboot (aka LinuxBIOS): The Free/Open-Source x86 Firmware (134 MB), is available from Youtube, get it for instance via:

  $ apt-get install youtube-dl
  $ youtube-dl http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X72LgcMpM9k

The talk includes various demos of coreboot and various payloads you can use with coreboot. One nice example is the TINT payload, a Tetris-like game for Linux (apt-get install tint for the curious), which has been reworked to be usable as a coreboot payload.

So, yes, you can now put Tetris in your BIOS ROM chip and play it from there (no hard drive required).

Other demos included some cluster nodes with coreboot, and a "normal" x86 desktop board booting coreboot + Linux in a very few seconds (much room left for optimizing there though, if you really want to get into fast booting).

Check out the full talk for more infos, and if you're willing to give it a try (see the list of currently supported boards), contact us on the mailing list or join the #coreboot IRC channel on Freenode.

Note: This article is part of my Testing stuff with QEMU series.

From the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD port page:

Debian GNU/kFreeBSD is a port that consists of GNU userland using the GNU C library on top of FreeBSD's kernel, coupled with the regular Debian package set.

Q: Why would anybody want to do that?
A: Why not? [1]

So, after we have talked about that, let's start:

1. Install QEMU:
   apt-get install qemu
2. Download the latest Debian GNU/kFreeBSD installer ISO image (either for i386 or amd64):
   wget http://glibc-bsd.alioth.debian.org/install-cd/kfreebsd-i386/20070313/debian-20070313-kfreebsd-i386-install.iso
3. Create a QEMU image which will hold the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD (i386) installation:
   qemu-img create -f qcow2 qemu_kfreebsd_i386.img 5G
4. Boot directly from the ISO image and install Debian into the QEMU image:
   qemu -boot d -cdrom debian-20070313-kfreebsd-i386-install.iso -hda qemu_kfreebsd_i386.img
5. The FreeBSD installer will now start. For more detailed instructions see the Installing Debian GNU/kFreeBSD manual.
   First you can choose between an "Express" or "Custom" install (I used "Express").
6. Next you end up in the partitioning tool. Type "a" to use the entire (QEMU) disk for the installation (the disk is called "ad0", not "hda" as on Linux). Type "q" to quit the partitioning tool.
7. You are now asked which boot manager to use. For QEMU you should use "BootMgr", the default FreeBSD boot manager. If you install on real hardware you can also use GRUB; in that case choose "None" here (see the manual for more information), but note that the installer does not install or configure GRUB for you! You should do that beforehand!
8. Next up: The disklabel editor. Here you'll create a partition ("slice" in FreeBSD-speak) for the root filesystem and a swap partition.
   Press "c" to create a new slice (will be called "ad0s1"), enter "4GB", choose "FS" (filesystem), and enter "/" for the root filesystem. Per default the UFS2 file system will be used. To create the swap partition, press "c" again, enter "1023MB", and select "swap". The new slice is called "ad0s1b". Press "q" to quit.
9. Choose "minimal" when asked which distribution to install.
10. Installation media dialog: select "CD/DVD" and "acd0" (for QEMU's ATAPI/IDE CD-ROM drive).
11. The installation will now begin, and after a while you're asked to switch to console 3 using ALT-F3. Do it.
12. You'll have to answer a bunch of questions: geographic area + city you're in (for timezone), whether you want to participate in the Debian popularity contest, whether module-init-tools should load additional drivers (no, so press ENTER three times). The installation will soon be finished.

At the end you must select "No" as you're told to do, then reboot via "Exit Install". You can then shutdown QEMU.

1. Restart QEMU with the newly installed Debian GNU/kFreeBSD:
   qemu -hda qemu_kfreebsd_i386.img
   
2. Press enter at the FreeBSD boot manager prompt, then login as root (there's no password).
3. First things first: Set up a root password:
   passwd
4. Now let's fix networking, update the system and install a bunch of packages:
   nano /etc/network/interfaces
   Yes, there's no vi, not even a symlink to nano! Uncomment the two "ed0" lines ("ed0" is the equivalent to "eth0" on Linux, I guess).
   /etc/init.d/networking restart
apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade
apt-get install vim xorg icewm xterm
5. You can fix your console keymap using the kbdcontrol package (just select your keymap from the menu):
   apt-get install kbdcontrol
6. Finally, let's fix X11 and start it. But first we create a new user, as we don't want to run X11 as root:
   adduser uwe
vi /etc/X11/xorg.conf
   The mouse device is "/dev/psm0", the protocol "PS/2", and the graphics driver should be "vesa":

     Section "InputDevice"
         Option "Device" "/dev/psm0"
         Option "Protocol" "PS/2"
     [...]
     Section "Device"
         Driver "vesa"
       

7. That's about it. Login as "uwe" (or whatever your username is) and start X11:
   startx

Wasn't all that hard, eh? Now, if you've got some spare time, head over to the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD wiki page and help improving this port ;-) You should probably start with reading the PORTING guide.

Both kfrebsd-i386 and kfreebsd-amd64 seem to be reasonably stable already (and more than 70% of the whole Debian archive builds fine on these architectures, see kfreebsd-i386_stats and kfreebsd-amd64_stats). I'll quite likely install kfreebsd-amd64 on one of my boxes soonish and start using it, maybe I'll even find some time to fix/patch/port some packages...

[1] More elaborate answer(s) and reasons are available in the Debian wiki.