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The LinuxBoot project allows you to replace your server's firmware with Linux.

• qemu emulated Q35 systems
• Intel S2600WF
• Dell R630
• Winterfell Open Compute node (works well)
• Leopard Open Compute node (works well)
• Tioga Pass Open Compute node (works well)
• Monolake Open Compute node (not tested)

Make sure you have installed the dependenciesuuid-dev,nasm, andacpica-tools (or equivalent for your distribution).

You need to provide:

• The vendor UEFI firmware for the mainboard
• A Linux kernel built with theCONFIG_EFI_BDS option enabled
• Aninitrd.cpio file with enough tools tokexec the rest of the system.

For theinitrd, theHeads firmware oru-root systems work well.Both will build minimal runtimes that can fit into the few megabytesof space available.

For everything except qemu, you'll need to copy the vendor ROM dumptoboards/$(BOARD)/$(BOARD).rom. Due to copyright restrictions, we can'tbundle the ROM images in this tree and you must supply your own ROM fromyour own machine. qemu can built its own ROM from theedk2 tree,so this is not necessary.

Configure the build system:

cp path/to/s2600wf.rom boards/s2600wf/make \BOARD=s2600wf \KERNEL=../path/to/bzImage \INITRD=../path/to/initrd.cpio.xz \configmake

This will write the values into the.config file so that you don'tneed to specify them each time. If all goes well you will end up witha file inbuild/$(BOARD)/linuxboot.rom that can be flashed to your machine.It will take a while since it also clones the LinuxBoot patched versionoftianocore/edk2 UDK2018 branchand build it.

If you want to experiment with LinuxBoot you can run it under qemu.No ROM file is necessary, although you still need a Heads or NERF runtimekernel/initrd pair. You can launch the emulator by running:

make run

This will use your current terminal as the serial console, whichwill likely mess with the settings. After killing qemu by closingthe window you will need to runstty sane to restore the terminalsettings (echo is likely turned off, so you'll have to type this inthe blind).

CopyMakefile.board from one of the other mainboards and edit it to matchyour new board's ROM layout. The qemu one is not the best example since it hasto match the complex layout of OVMF; most real mainboards are not this messy.

You'll need to figure out which FVs have to be preserved, how much spacecan be recovered from the ME region, etc. The per-board makefile needsto set the following variables:

• FVS: an ordered list of IFD, firmware volumes and padding
• linuxboot-size: the final size of the ROM image in bytes (we should verify this against the real ROM instead)

For reference,earlier approaches are documented.Have a look at those in case you want to add a board that was already supported.There is knowledge in terms of what had to be done in order to deploy LinuxBoot.

• https://www.linuxboot.org/
• https://trmm.net/LinuxBoot_34c3