Coreboot and PC technical details
Channel: FOSDEM
Date: 27/02/2010

By Peter Stuge

A modern PC is quite different from the 1980s original, and while the BIOS still lingers after 30 years it must now solve many tricky problems.

When the original PC with it's pre-ISA expansion bus was powered on, it was almost immediately ready to run an application. Today's PC can have several multicore CPUs interconnected by HyperTransport, Front Side Bus or QuickPath, DDR3 RAM on each CPU, and a large number of buses and peripherals. Many components require increasingly complex initialization to be implemented in software. This talk describes the technical challenges encountered by coreboot developers and their solutions.


FOSDEM (Free and Open Source Development European Meeting) is a European event centered around Free and Open Source software development. It is aimed at developers and all interested in the Free and Open Source news in the world. Its goals are to enable developers to meet and to promote the awareness and use of free and open source software. More info at http://fosdem.org