LinuxCon North America/CloudOpen North America

Firmware is crucial part of almost every hardware. Very often it is not visible to the user. However, there are firmwares which are known better than the others. Especially PC BIOS and recently EFI is quite visible. There are also some replacements for them like coreboot which takes more and more supporters. This presentation will show a history of their development, main features and differences. Also, it will show how to test some of them without access to the special hardware and uncommon tools.

This presentation is targeted to developers and administrators. They should know the machine boot sequence, when firmware is involved during the system startup and run as well as when its code is deliberately omitted. It will help them to understand the main PC BIOS, EFI and coreboot features and drawbacks.