Open Source Firmware — Why Should We Support It?
Firmware is the most powerful software that runs on a platform. It can tear your security concerns apart if configured wrongly, and it can prevent your platform from booting if written faulty. So it should be more important what is running on the lowest level of hardware on your platform. There are several alternatives for the Basic Input Output System (BIOS) your server or laptop is running right now.
BIOS is dead since 10 years ago.
Nowadays the Firmware — this is how you actually call it — can be built upon various frameworks. Most of the firmware today supports the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface(UEFI) standard which has been published in 2007 by Intel, AMD, Microsoft, and other PC manufactures.
Already 1999 an open-source alternative called LinuxBIOS was born in the Los Alamos National Laboratory with the goal to create a BIOS which boots fast and can be configured more flexible than the current standard. Even though LinuxBIOS, nowadays called coreboot, was constantly improved and is still under development, it only gained traction in the last couple of years.
State of the Art
So — what is the state of the art of firmware development? The truth is:
Firmware Development is still in…
