Developers

Getting started

coreboot (formerly known as LinuxBIOS) believes in the principles of Open Source software. It borrows many well known concepts from other Open Source projects, like Kconfig, the Linux kernel coding style, a git repository, and gerrit for code reviews.

Traditional firmware development works with one-off shots for a given device. That is why you can still buy so many devices with buggy firmware. The bug was fixed a long time ago, just not in your copy of the tree. This won't happen to you with coreboot.

Get the source code (cannot push patches)

Clone the repository:

git clone https://review.coreboot.org/coreboot.git

Submiting patches

Once you created your Gerrit Review account, set up your gerrit http password and add it to your $HOME/.netrc file:

machine review.coreboot.org login YourUserNameHere password YourPasswordHere

Clone the repository:

git clone https://review.coreboot.org/coreboot.git

Setup all git hooks:

make gitconfig

Have fun!

Additional information

Development guidelines Developer manual Gerrit Review guidelines Coding Style

Licenses

The coreboot project as a whole is licensed as GPLv2. The files within the codebase are licensed individually, with many files licensed as BSD, or GPLv2+. The libpayload subproject is licensed as BSD. All contributions to libpayload MUST be compatible with the BSD license.

Community and infrastructure

IRC IRC via Matrix Discord Mailing list Gerrit Review Bugtracker Jenkins CI Coverity Calendar for events Code of Conduct QA System

How to start development

We carefully selected a list of hardware tools that will make dealing with coreboot a lot easier. Part of the process of choosing this hardware is that it either works with open source utilities, or we write Open Source utilities for it. These utilities make it easy to build and deploy coreboot in automated environments.

Tutorial

Our documentation contains a tutorial to get started. Part 1 shows how to build coreboot on your PC and run it on a QEMU virtual machine.