The wiki is being retired!

Documentation is now handled by the same processes we use for code: Add something to the Documentation/ directory in the coreboot repo, and it will be rendered to https://doc.coreboot.org/. Contributions welcome!

This is work in progress!

There are a lot of (Free Software, as well as proprietary) firmware implementations available these days, which can be very confusing. This page tries to give an overview.

coreboot

License: GPLv2.

FreeBIOS

This project is dead and was merged into coreboot. Use coreboot instead. License: GPLv2.

OpenBIOS

Open Firmware IEEE 1275-1994 implementation. Kernel and some modules are written in C. Large parts of the code base is written in Forth. License: GPL.

OpenFirmware

"The original" Open Firmware IEEE 1275-1994 implementation was open sourced in 2006/2007 by Mitch Bradley. License: BSD.

SmartFirmware

Open Firmware IEEE 1275-1994 implementation completely written in ANSI C. Features a C to FCode compiler.

OpenBoot

SUN's "fork" of Open Firmware.

U-Boot

Very wide spread firmware, mostly used on ARM, PPC and MIPS based embedded systems, but not so much for x86 systems. Features a small shell.

(U)EFI

Umbrella name for several firmware implementations implementing the EFI/UEFI interface.

Tiano Core

UEFI based bootloader.

Firmware Comparison