Episode Details

This episode is all about getting computers up and running. The software that kicks in after you flick the power switch until the operating system kernel starts up to be more precise. And to be more precise, today's episode is about Coreboot, a FLOSS project aimed at replacing BIOS (rarely these days), UEFI (more often these days) and friends. Plus quite a few primers on CPUs, RAM chips and other esoteric aspects that you always wanted to know about but were too afraid to ask :-).

Links

• IPL/booting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booting#History
• BIOS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BIOS
• Floppy disk: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk
• UEFI: https://uefi.org
• Coreboot: https://www.coreboot.org
• Canonical's UEFI shim: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UEFI/SecureBoot
• Device Tree spec: https://www.devicetree.org
• Oreboot: https://github.com/oreboot/oreboot
• Linus about C++ and the Linux kernel: https://lkml.org/lkml/2004/1/20/20
• HP Moonshot: https://www.hewlettpackardhistory.com/item/the-miracle-of-moonshot
• Das U-Boot: https://u-boot.org
• Gummiboot (now systemd-boot): https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/systemd-boot.html
• Libreboot: https://libreboot.org
• Grumpy Old Coders: https://grumpy-old-coders.org
• Software Freedom Podcast: https://fsfe.org/news/podcast.en.html