OpenBIOS

OpenBIOS is an IEEE 1275-1994 compliant firmware which can also be used as a coreboot payload.

Building

OpenBIOS

First you need to manually install fcode-utils. Your distribution may provide a ready-made package for fcode-utils -- on Debian systems you can do apt-get install fcode-utils for instance. Then you can build OpenBIOS as follows:

$ svn co svn://openbios.org/openbios/openbios-devel
$ cd openbios-devel
$ config/scripts/switch-arch x86
$ make

The file obj-x86/openbios-builtin.elf is your final OpenBIOS payload to be used with coreboot. Alternatively, you can use obj-x86/openbios-plain.elf, which does not contain a built-in dictionary and is thus a lot smaller (but not too useful).

coreboot

Finally, you have to build coreboot (v3 in this example) with OpenBIOS as payload:

$ cd ..
$ svn co svn://coreboot.org/repository/coreboot-v3
$ cp openbios-devel/obj-x86/openbios-builtin.elf coreboot-v3/payload.elf
$ cd coreboot-v3
$ make menuconfig

Now enter the Payload menu and select Payload type and then An ELF executable payload file. Now exit the menu, save your settings, and build coreboot:

$ make

The file build/coreboot.rom (or build/bios.bin) is your final coreboot v3 image, which also contains the payload.

Running OpenBIOS in QEMU

For running the coreboot+OpenBIOS image in QEMU, you need a patched version of vgabios-cirrus.bin in your build directory first:

$ cd build
$ wget http://www.coreboot.org/images/0/0d/Vgabios-cirrus.zip
$ unzip Vgabios-cirrus.zip
$ cd ..

You can now run it in QEMU:

$ qemu -L build -hda /dev/zero -serial stdio

Ready-made QEMU image

Please follow these instructions if you want to try out coreboot and OpenBIOS in QEMU.

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