Uwe Hermann | A slightly paranoid Debian developer

The coreboot project (previously known as LinuxBIOS) is taking part in the Google Summer of Code™ 2008 program. This year, the project has been assigned two slots/students who will work on the following projects:

• All Virtual All The Time (AVATT):

  This project aims to integrate into the coreboot BIOS a payload consisting of a minimalist KVM-aware Linux kernel along with an initrd image that contains the tools needed for creating and starting guest virtual machines installed on top of it. The resulting system could host any x86(or x86-64) OS that can run over KVM (almost any major OS does), and there is a great challenge to make it as small as possible, so that it can fit in a 2MB flash image.

• SCSI booting in coreboot:

  Currently coreboot can not boot from an arbitrary SCSI controller. There are two solutions for the problem: (1) Use Linux and Kexec. This requires to keep the SCSI driver in the flash chip. (2) Use x86emu/vm86/ADLO and the int13 method. This would allow to use the PCI option rom available on all modern SCSI controllers. So we obviously need a solution based on the latter. This could as well be implemented as a Linux program, as an intermediate payload, or as a shared library. At this point of time, I would like to implemente it as a daemon program. The program needs to catch the int13 interrupt vector that the SCSI option rom installs and make it available to arbitrary (firmware/payload) code trying to load something from disk.

This should make for an interesting summer with nice improvements for coreboot.

Public Service Announcement: The LinuxBIOS project, a Free Software project which intends to replace the proprietary BIOS found in most computers these days, has been renamed to coreboot.

The old name has become quite a misnomer in recent years; the name LinuxBIOS created the impression that it's a drop-in BIOS-replacement and that it's using Linux or is Linux-specific in any way. Neither is the case.

• coreboot is not a BIOS in the sense that it provides the legacy BIOS callbacks / interrupt routines. Instead, coreboot is just a small hardware initialization firmware. It does some basic hardware init, then hands over control to one of many possible payloads. This can be a boot loader such as FILO (or GRUB2, which shall ultimately replace FILO) if you want to boot from disk, or Plan 9, or memtest86, or a Linux kernel, or OpenBIOS/OpenFirmware/SmartFirmware, or...
• coreboot is not Linux or Linux-specific. Yes, it can indeed use Linux kernels as payload (i.e., you put the Linux kernel in your flash ROM chip together with coreboot) or boot a Linux kernel indirectly using FILO/GRUB2. But as mentioned above it can also be used (together with the fitting payload) to boot other OSes or systems such as Plan 9, Windows, FreeBSD, and others.

The initial author and project leader of LinuxBIOS/coreboot, Ron Minnich, explains in more detail why the renaming was done in his original announcement on the coreboot mailing list.