Post #4211300

Today, #Coreboot met #FreeBSD. https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/commit/?id=5f74217c05a99f38a31a6e4950220964595d4ac8 When I started writing FreeBSD drivers, a friend told me: So you’re just copying Linux drivers and rewriting them for FreeBSD ? Sounds like script work. I explained that it doesnt work like that. First you understand the hardware. Sometimes you have to reverse engineer it. Then you test it. Only after that do you submit a driver. He replied: Fine. Then write a driver that doesn’t exist in any operating system. That turned into a 500 MAD bet. (MAD is Morocco’s currency, not a measure of my sanity.) The challenge is harder than it sounds. Almost every piece of hardware already has a Windows driver, a MacOS driver, a Linux driver, or follows a standard interface. You dont invent hardware. You find a missing need. So I wrote a driver for Coreboot. Normally, the kernel log starts when the kernel boots. Everything that happened before that is a mystery. You can make educated guesses, but thats all they are. With this driver, FreeBSD can read the Coreboot log. You get to see what happened from the very first moment the machine powered on. That is exactly how I tracked down systems where RAM training was taking far too long because of defective memory chips. None of this would have been possible without the amazing work of the Coreboot team. As far as I know, FreeBSD is now the first operating system with this driver. DragonFlyBSD is next.