Back in April, System76 released the Lemur Pro laptop and one of the highlights was that it pulled in a lot more open source. It seems those clever engineers aren't stopping there.
System76 have their own fork of Coreboot, an open source replacement for the usual proprietary BIOS (firmware) found in most devices. They've continued working on it and now a System76 engineer, Jeremy Soller, has mentioned on Twitter that their fork now supports NVIDIA graphics in hybrid mode, and that NVIDIA laptops from System76 with both their System76 Open Firmware and their System76 Open Source Embedded Controller are "inevitable". Soller also shared this picture of it running:
Keeping in mind that's Soller's personal account and not a statement of anything confirmed upcoming, it's still quite an exciting idea for more hardware options.
Wonderful to see all the fantastic work System76 are doing together. They just recently launched the Serval WS laptop, powered by 3rd gen Ryzen too which looks like quite the monster power-house.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
RichardYao Jun 12, 2020
https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware
I was confused as to why they would support both Core Boot and Open Firwmare given that they are mutually exclusive.
OpenFirmware is controlled using a command prompt that also can be accessed remotely via serial, which makes it really nice to administrate. It's also usually more consistent and featureful than BIOS. Furthermore it was combined with a nice system where you didn't need to download/install drivers from some external media but the driver was shipped using FORTH code on the device.
Anyhow, rather old technology from the 90s that's still superior to anything we have in the PC world right now unfortunately.
slaapliedje Jun 13, 2020
OpenFirmware was the Firmware that was used on Sun SPARC stations as their alternative to IBM BIOS. IIRC Apple used it as well on their PPC macs, other PPC systems sometimes used it as well.I bought a Powerbook G4 to put MorphOS on it and I agree, Open Firmware is fantastic. Damn shame it never kept going on other devices.
OpenFirmware is controlled using a command prompt that also can be accessed remotely via serial, which makes it really nice to administrate. It's also usually more consistent and featureful than BIOS. Furthermore it was combined with a nice system where you didn't need to download/install drivers from some external media but the driver was shipped using FORTH code on the device.
Anyhow, rather old technology from the 90s that's still superior to anything we have in the PC world right now unfortunately.
OpenFirmware was the Firmware that was used on Sun SPARC stations as their alternative to IBM BIOS. IIRC Apple used it as well on their PPC macs, other PPC systems sometimes used it as well.I bought a Powerbook G4 to put MorphOS on it and I agree, Open Firmware is fantastic. Damn shame it never kept going on other devices.
OpenFirmware is controlled using a command prompt that also can be accessed remotely via serial, which makes it really nice to administrate. It's also usually more consistent and featureful than BIOS. Furthermore it was combined with a nice system where you didn't need to download/install drivers from some external media but the driver was shipped using FORTH code on the device.
Anyhow, rather old technology from the 90s that's still superior to anything we have in the PC world right now unfortunately.
Yep, definitely a shame, I still have access to some Sun SPARC machines used for some server stuff at university and it's such great technology!
We have ZFS, Solaris ldoms, OpenFirmware, Boot Environments, etc., ...
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