OEM/ODMs

Getting started

coreboot provides a fast, reliable, secure, and predictable boot-firmware solution for numerous modern and legacy chipsets. There are millions of devices running coreboot, including Google Chromebooks and Chromeboxes, and it runs in many datacenters. In 2016, coreboot.org has over 300 active developers, and roughly 60000 lines of code are added each quarter.

Advantages

Using coreboot has numerous advantages for an OEM/ODM. coreboot comes with SoC support available to all developers. You share your codebase with other companies which are helping improving the SoC and driver-specific implementations. But there are also other reasons to use coreboot as your standard firmware.

Extremely fast

• coreboot is designed to do the minimum amount necessary and get out of the way.
• Especially for servers, coreboot provides faster boot up.
• Desktop and Notebooks boot up in 400ms - 2.5s.
• Server boot time can be as low as a quarter of the OEM BIOS boot time.

Flexible and customizable

• Because coreboot does hardware init, then jumps to a payload to continue, it is very flexible.
• Payload support for everything which is a ELF binary. Feel free to ship your own payload !
• GPLv2 licensed core. Payloads can be proprietary and we offer a BSD licensed support library.
• coreboot provides ready-to-build payloads like UEFI, SeaBIOS, U-Boot, Grub2 and many more..

Made with safety in mind

• Recovery Mode based on multiple copies of the firmware which can be updated independently.
• Integrity of stages and binaries in coreboot can be easily verified.

Designed for security by default

• Uses a minimal trusted computing base for each platform which is easily auditable, helping to guarantee security.
• As coreboot is Open Source, anyone can check the codebase.
• On blob-free platforms, coreboot provides completely auditable boot firmware.
• After it has completed initialization, more than 99% of the code is removed from memory.
• Platform security features are supported like IOMMU, flash protections, TEE and more..
• coreboot comes with Secure Boot support called VBOOT2.

Debugging done easily

• There are multiple ways to extract the boot log, from classic serial to EHCI debug, even over the pc-speaker.
• Using the partner-project Serialice, software debug is available from just after the reset vector.
• GDB Stub support via serial.
• In memory console log support
• Tracing functions and other exotic features are supported as well.

Saves costs and time

• Unlike UEFI EDK2, it includes full platform support for different architectures and SoC vendors.
• Unlike U-Boot, coreboot strongly encourages a single source tree model,
  making it easier to adapt feature development to different boards and chipsets.
• X86, ARM/64, POWER8 and RISC-V are supported architectures.
• It works with operating systems like Windows, OS X, Linux and Android out of the box.
• Supported and maintained code for Intel FSP and AMD AGESA platforms.
• Porting new hardware on an existing chipset to coreboot can done extremely quickly, usually within 1 week.

Quality assurance

• All changes to the code are peer reviewed, to maintain code quality. Additionally, changes are build and run tested.
• There are test frameworks like REACTS or LAVA to hook up your device and perform automated testing.

Need help with coreboot?

If you do not employ your own firmware engineers, you can contact one of our many licensed coreboot contractors. Additional help is available through the extensive documentation on coreboot processes and an active online community, both in IRC and on the mailing list.