oreboot is a downstream fork of coreboot, i.e. oreboot is coreboot without 'c'.

oreboot will only target truly open systems requiring no binary blobs. For now, that means no x86. oreboot is mostly written in Rust, with assembly where needed.

oreboot currently only plans to support LinuxBoot payloads.

Oreboot+QEMU for RISC-V HiFive Unleased:

Oreboot+QEMU for ARM:

Clone this repo and enter its directory, i.e.:

git clone git:https://github.com/oreboot/oreboot
cd oreboot

In general, you will need the following packages installed:

• device-tree-compiler
• pkg-config
• libssl
• rustup

For Debian based systems, there is a make target to install those, which pulls rustup through curl from https://sh.rustup.rs:

make debiansysprepare

Otherwise, install the package through your system package manager.

Regardless of your OS, you will need to install the toolchain for oreboot. This command only needs to be done once but it is safe to do it repeatedly.

make firsttime

Each time you start to work with oreboot, or even daily:

cd oreboot
make update

You should definitely do this before reporting any issues.

To build oreboot for a specific platform, do this:

# Go to the mainboard's directory.
cd src/mainboard/sifive/hifive
# Build in release mode.
make
# Build in debug mode.
MODE=debug make
# View disassembly
make objdump
# Run in QEMU simulation.
make run
# Flash with flashrom.
make flash

The root Makefile allows you to quickly build all platforms:

# build all mainboards
make mainboards
# build everything in parallel
make -j mainboards

# Install QEMU for your target platform, e.g. x86
sudo apt install qemu-system-x86

# Build release build and start with QEMU
cd src/mainboard/emulation/qemu-q35 && make run
# Quit qemu with CTRL-A X

To build QEMU from source for RISC-V:

git clone https://github.com/qemu/qemu && cd qemu
mkdir build-riscv64 && cd build-riscv64
../configure --target-list=riscv64-softmmu
make -j$(nproc)
# QEMU binary is at riscv64-softmmu/qemu-system-riscv64

• Emulation
  • qemu-armv7
  • qemu-q35
  • qemu-riscv
• Hardware
  • Aspeed ast25x0
  • Nuvoton npcm7xx
  • OpenTitan crb, Documentation
  • SiFive HiFive Unleashed, Documentation

• Makefile must be simple. They cannot contain control flow.
• Cargo.toml files are located in the src/mainboard/x/y directories. which will allow us to build all boards in parallel.
• All code is auto-formatted with rustfmt with no exceptions. There are no vestiges of the 19th century such as line length limits.
• There will be no C.
• We will not run our own Gerrit. We are using Github for now, and the github Pull Request review mechanism.
• We will not run our own Jenkins. We will use the most appropriate CI; for now, that is Azure but we will be flexible.

• We prefer all pieces of the firmware to be open-source; but can accept an ME and FSP binary blob for x86 architectures.
• Blobs must be essential to boot the system and not provide any extraneous functionality which could not be implemented in Oreboot.
• Blobs must be redistributable and are ideally available on GitHub.
• Blobs must not be submitted to github.com/oreboot/oreboot. We prefer blobs to be submitted to github.com/oreboot/blobs, github.com/coreboot/blobs or some other GitHub repository.
• The blobs must be in a binary format. No additional C code, assembly files or header files are acceptable.
• Any compromises to the language safety features of Rust must be explicitly stated.

As a "measure" for how open-source firmware is, use the percentage of the final binary size. For example, if 70% of the firmware bytes are closed-source blob and 30% built from Oreboot source code, we would say the firmware is 30% open-source.

The copyright on oreboot is owned by quite a large number of individual developers and companies. Please check the individual source files for details.

oreboot is licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). Some files are licensed under the "GPL (version 2, or any later version)", and some files are licensed under the "GPL, version 2". For some parts, which were derived from other projects, other (GPL-compatible) licenses may apply. Please check the individual source files for details.

This makes the resulting oreboot images licensed under the GPL, version 2.