Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

On March 7, sponsored by byte beat, the "Cloud firmware Exchange Salon" jointly organized by Intel, OCP-OSF (Open System Firmware) and OSFF (Open System Firmware Foundation) communities was held in Beijing. At the meeting, Byte Jump officially released the new generation of cloud firmware Cloud Firmware 2.0, which is the first time to produce a firmware solution for coreboot in an X86 server.

Firmware is the basic module of all kinds of electronic devices. From smartwatches to data center servers, firmware is first run to initialize the hardware and boot the operating system. Cloud Firmware 2.0 fully embraces the introduction of Linux ecological coreboot, and carries the fourth generation Intel Xeon scalable processor Sapphire Rapids, which is open, flexible and lightweight.

Compared to traditional UEFI firmware schemes, Cloud Firmware 2.0 has the following advantages:

First, high code efficiency: the coreboot and LinuxBoot communities are highly active, the code is open source, it is easier to share information and resources, and can improve the speed of development, identify and solve problems faster.

Second, faster timeliness: iterative import of Silicon code is faster. From the production experience of Cloud Firmware 2.0, it takes less than half a day to update Silicon code, while it will take at least 2 weeks on UEFI.

Third, the learning cost is lower: the threshold of coreboot + LinuxBoot technology is lower than that of UEFI, and the development is faster. Compared with UEFI special C programming, LinuxBoot is implemented in Go high-level language, and coreboot is developed from LinuxBIOS, which is consistent with the style of C code learned in colleges and universities.

Fourth, the code has a high degree of modularization: the implementation of general specifications / protocols such as SMBIOS, ACPI, PCIE, IPMI and Redfish can be common among different platforms, and for new projects, the time of transplanting and developing general code can be greatly saved.

Fifth, the code execution efficiency is high: both coreboot and LinuxBoot compilation only take a minute and a half, which can greatly improve the efficiency of development and debugging.

Zhang Yu, head of the byte jump system technology and engineering team, said at the salon that after two iterations, Cloud Firmware finally adopted the technical route of coreboot + LinuxBoot to achieve innovation and landing in the technical solution. OCP-OSF Community, Intel and other companies have provided strong support to this, and jointly created a new development cooperation model.

Zhang Yu said that he is very happy to see that the community has accepted the adoption of Cloud Firmware to define a new generation of firmware solutions (coreboot+LinuxBoot). "the development of any technology and solution is inseparable from the support of partners and ecology. Byte Jump hopes to attract more enterprises and developers to participate in this event and promote the progress of the new firmware solution together."

Picture: speech by Zhang Yu, head of the technical and engineering team of byte runout system

According to GE Shijian, a byte-bouncing cloud firmware architect, the second-generation cloud firmware inherits the cooperative development model of the first-generation cloud firmware: the chip part cooperates directly with chip vendors, the platform part cooperates with system vendors, and also works closely with the coreboot community to promote the community ecological construction of coreboot in the server field, solving the current coreboot community code for server platform problems. The efficient cooperative development mode inside and outside has accelerated the production process of coreboot. Up to now, byte jump and partners have completed the development, verification and production of Cloud Firmware 2.0. The first batch of second-generation cloud firmware packages has been completed and is scheduled to launch tens of thousands of CPU this year.

During the exchange salon, guests such as the OCP community Project Lead, Intel's Anjaneya (Reddy) Chagam, Ron Minnich, the inventor of coreboot & LinuxBoot, and Christian Walter, the co-founder of OSFF, believed that Cloud Firmware was about to break the rigid ecology, redefine server system firmware, and open up a new route of server system firmware design. Everyone shared the application of Cloud Firmware in AMD, ARM and RISC-V, and expressed the hope that more partners in the industry would join us to create a new firmware ecology that is more open, easy to use and integrated, and contribute technical strength to the prosperity of open computing ecology.

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