Original author(s) | Ronald G. Minnich, Eric Biederman, Li-Ta (Ollie) Lo, Stefan Reinauer, and the coreboot community |
---|---|
Initial release | 1999 |
Stable release | |
Repository | |
Written in | Mostly C, about 1% in assembly and optionally SPARK |
Platform | IA-32, x86-64, ARMv7,[3] ARMv8, MIPS, RISC-V, POWER8 |
Type | Firmware |
License | GPLv2-only[4] |
Website | www |
coreboot, formerly known as LinuxBIOS,[5] is a software project aimed at replacing proprietary firmware (BIOS or UEFI) found in most computers with a lightweight firmware designed to perform only the minimum number of tasks necessary to load and run a modern 32-bit or 64-bit operating system.
Since coreboot initializes the bare hardware, it must be ported to every chipset and motherboard that it supports. As a result, coreboot is available only for a limited number of hardware platforms and motherboard models.
One of the coreboot variants is Libreboot, a software distribution partly free of proprietary blobs, aimed at end users.