Many users were clamoring for it and Slimbook has listened to your requests. The Valencian company once again surprises us with good news, as it works hard to integrate the system Coreboot on your computers and thus make them even more open. Without a doubt, a great step forward in terms of getting rid of that closed firmware that offers so many disadvantages, not only for philosophical or ethical reasons, but also for technical issues such as boot speed and security.
But let's go back a bit to better understand this Slimbook feat ... BIOS / UEFI It is a unified interface with a closed firmware system with routines or code necessary to start the equipment. This code stored in a programmable ROM memory performs a series of routines to be able to initialize all the connected hardware devices and give control to the boot loader to locate an operating system with which to boot.
To do this, the UEFI consists of three stages or phases known as:
- SEC (Security): It is the first phase when the system boots and handles all the initial events and can pass some basic information for the PEI phase. It basically contains the code necessary for initializing the CPU in a known state of registers.
- PEI (Pre-Initialization): after the previous phase, this new phase that comes into operation will be invoked to configure the entire platform to leave everything ready and then transfer control to DXE.
- DXE (Driver eXecution Environment): when the drivers or drivers of the devices or peripherals of the computer are loaded. If necessary, it also mounts disks, and finds and executes the system boot code. After this step, control is transferred to the localized operating system ...
All this is necessary to understand that Coreboot is a project oriented to replace proprietary firmware that we find in BIOS / UEFI for an open source. In other words, Coreboot replaces the SEC and PEI phases. But it should not be confused with another project that we have already talked about, LinuxBoot, which comes to replace the DXE phase to provide greater speed and security. Therefore, Coreboot is a code that acts much earlier in the boot process compared to LinuxBoot. Coreboot makes possible everything that Linux is not capable of doing by itself, such as initializing the platform (CPU, DRAM, ACPI, enumeration of PCI devices, loading the bootloader or boot loader ...).