Getting started with: coreboot

What is coreboot?

coreboot is an open source firmware alternative which aims to replace your standard BIOS or UEFI. The overall philosophy of coreboot is: Do as much as needed, then jump straight payload. But wait.. what actually is your firmware good for? And what is a payload? Let”s do a short recap before we jump straight into coreboot.

In the book “Embedded Firmware Solutions” by Jiming Sun, Marc Jones, and Vincent Zimmer, firmware is defined as following: “Firmware is the layer of software between hardware and the OS”.

Firmware in general is a piece of software that runs on a very low level. It is not encapsulated by any OS or framework. A lot of devices have firmware on it, like: HDDs, SSDs, Graphics Cards, Ethernet Cards, Remote Controls, Smart TVs and of course computers. In this series, we will focus on firmware for computers/embedded devices. Typically the firmware does the hardware initialization and then hands over the control to the operation system. Nowadays, this isn’t true anymore. Most of the time, parts of the firmware have to stay active in order to provide certain functionalities. We will not go into too much detail on this now(Taking notes that I have to write a much more detailed article about coreboot/firmware in general). Just remember for now: Firmware does the hardware initialization of the device.