Welcome to OpenBIOS

OpenBIOS is a free portable firmware implementation. The goal is to implement a 100% IEEE 1275-1994 (Referred to as Open Firmware) compliant firmware. Among its features, Open Firmware provides an instruction set independent device interface. This can be used to boot the operating system from expansion cards without native initialization code. It is OpenBIOS' goal to work on all common platforms, like x86, Alpha, AMD64 and IPF. With its flexible and modular design, OpenBIOS also targets embedded systems, where a sane and unified firmware is a crucial design goal and reduces porting efforts noticably.

Open Firmware is found on many servers and workstations and there are several commercial implementations from SUN, Firmworks, CodeGen, Apple, IBM and others.

Download Get the latest version of OpenBIOS. See the development download page or the releases page. Contact The easiest way to get in contact with the OpenBIOS team is to subscribe the OpenBIOS mailinglist. If you want to contribute to OpenBIOS development, you should subscribe to the mailinglist as well. See further information on the Mailinglist page. Project Statement Our Project Statement contains some words about the intention of OpenBIOS and how we want to realize those goals. This is a rough draft of the dos and don'ts in the project and worthwhile reading if you consider contributing to the project. Credits Who are the people behind OpenBIOS? Who helped and contributed to make OpenBIOS as successful as it is today. See the growing Credits page for a (yet incomplete) list of people contributing to OpenBIOS with hardware, patches, code, hints, etc.

News LinuxBIOS Symposium 2006 (2006-10-01) The first European LinuxBIOS Symposium 2006 took place in Hamburg from October 1st to 3rd. This event was organized by coresystems GmbH. FCODE suite 1.0.1 available (2006-09-21) David Paktor, of the IBM Corporation, has contributed to the OpenBIOS FCODE suite. This release has higher test coverage, a more detailed report on one type of error, and removal of dead code and consolidation of some other code. SUN released OpenBOOT source code (2006-09-06) SUN microsystems has recently released their OpenBOOT source code to the community under a BSD license. Go to their OpenSparc T1 website] to download the full archive (190MB) or check out our local mirror (1.7MB). New FCODE suite available (2006-08-08) David Paktor, of the IBM Corporation, has contributed some groundbreaking feature updates to the OpenBIOS FCODE utilities toke, detok and romheaders. Find details and binaries here. [older news]