The open source firmware foundation, established a few months ago, aims to promote the use of open source firmware throughout the industry. Linuxboot is now the latest member of the open source firmware foundation The open source firmware Foundation (osff) was established as a non-profit legal entity to help promote open source firmware in the industry and provide enterprises and individuals with information on the use, training, activities and other tasks of open source firmware.
As part of osff, Intel has been calling for more openness to its FSP (firmware support package).
This weekend, the open source firmware foundation announced that the linuxboot project has joined the umbrella organization. Linuxboot is trying to make a Linux kernel based implementation replace most of the UEFI driver execution environment. After joining the open source firmware foundation, linuxboot can enter the actual Linux Installation of kexec'ing or continue to be compatible with another supported operating system.
Linuxboot is a free software project designed to replace most of the driver execution environment (DxE) modules in the unified extensible firmware interface (UEFI) firmware with the Linux kernel. Linuxboot must run on the basis of hardware initialization software to start. This can be the pre EFI initialization (PEI) part of UEFI, coreboot, or u-boot. It can start Linux through kexec syscall, but it can also start [windows] in different ways( https://microsoft.pvxt.net/x9Vg1 )。
Nerf is a compact version of EFI that includes the Linux kernel and user area applications. This project is split into linuxboot (including boot block and kernel) and U-root (including user area application). Linuxboot became an official project of the Linux foundation in 2018.
Currently, EFI support for linuxboot is limited to a few servers:
Dell r630
Open computing projects Winterfell, leopard, monolake and Tioga pass
Intel s2600wf
Theoretically, linuxboot also supports all motherboards supported by the coreboot project, including OCP monolake. In practice, due to the limitation of flash memory size, the support is limited.
If you are not familiar with what linuxboot is, visit linuxboot Org to learn more:
