{"id":449,"date":"2018-10-17T11:40:55","date_gmt":"2018-10-17T11:40:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.appservgrid.com\/paw92\/index.php\/2018\/10\/17\/linuxboot-for-servers-enter-open-source-goodbye-proprietary-uefi\/"},"modified":"2018-10-17T11:40:55","modified_gmt":"2018-10-17T11:40:55","slug":"linuxboot-for-servers-enter-open-source-goodbye-proprietary-uefi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.appservgrid.com\/paw92\/index.php\/2018\/10\/17\/linuxboot-for-servers-enter-open-source-goodbye-proprietary-uefi\/","title":{"rendered":"LinuxBoot for Servers: Enter Open Source, Goodbye Proprietary UEFI"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last updated October 6, 2018 By Avimanyu Bandyopadhyay<\/a> 19 Comments<\/a> <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

LinuxBoot<\/a> is an Open Source alternative<\/a> to Proprietary UEFI<\/a> firmware. It was released last year and is now being increasingly preferred by leading hardware manufacturers as default firmware. Last year, LinuxBoot was warmly welcomed<\/a> into the Open Source family by The Linux Foundation.<\/p>\n

This project was an initiative by Ron Minnich, author of LinuxBIOS and lead of coreboot<\/a> at Google, in January 2017.<\/p>\n

Google, Facebook, Horizon Computing Solutions<\/a>, and Two Sigma<\/a> collaborated together to develop the LinuxBoot project<\/a> (formerly called NERF<\/a>) for server machines based on Linux.<\/p>\n

Its openness allows Server users to easily customize their own boot scripts, fix issues, build their own runtimes<\/a> and reflash their firmware<\/a> with their own keys. They do not need to wait for vendor updates.<\/p>\n

Following is a video of Ubuntu Xenial<\/a> booting for the first time with NERF BIOS:<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s talk about some other advantages by comparing it to UEFI in terms of Server hardware.<\/p>\n

Advantages of LinuxBoot over UEFI<\/h2>\n

\"LinuxBoot<\/p>\n

Here are some of the major advantages of LinuxBoot over UEFI:<\/p>\n

Significantly
\nfaster startup<\/h3>\n

It can boot up Server boards in less than twenty seconds, versus multiple minutes on UEFI.<\/p>\n

Significantly
\nmore flexible<\/h3>\n

LinuxBoot
\ncan make use of any devices, filesystems and protocols that Linux
\nsupports.<\/p>\n

Potentially
\nmore secure
\n<\/h3>\n

Linux device drivers and filesystems have significantly more scrutiny than through UEFI.<\/p>\n

We can argue that UEFI is partly open with EDK II<\/a> and LinuxBoot is partly closed. But it has been addressed<\/a> that even such EDK II code does not have the proper level of inspection and correctness as the Linux Kernel<\/a> goes through, while there is a huge amount of other Closed Source components within UEFI development.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, LinuxBoot has a significantly smaller amount of binaries with only a few hundred KB, compared to the 32 MB of UEFI binaries.<\/p>\n

To be precise, LinuxBoot fits a whole lot better into the Trusted Computing Base<\/a>, unlike UEFI.<\/p>\n

LinuxBoot has a kexec<\/a> based bootloader which does not support startup on Windows\/non-Linux kernels, but that is insignificant since most clouds are Linux-based Servers.<\/p>\n

LinuxBoot adoption<\/h2>\n

In 2011, the Open Compute Project<\/a> was started by Facebook<\/a> who open-sourced<\/a> designs of some of their Servers, built to make its data centers more efficient. LinuxBoot has been tested on a few Open Compute Hardware listed as under:<\/p>\n