Coreboot 20th Anniversary

The LinuxBIOS project began at Los Alamos National Lab in Summer 1999, as the first piece of the Clustermatic HPC software stack. Why Linux? Because firmware always evolves to become an operating system. Rather than wait for evolution to take its course, LANL decided to save some time and use Linux as the BIOS: hence LinuxBIOS.

A lot of the early history is contained in mailing lists and web pages, now lost. Thanks to git and the WayBack machine, some of the details can be found. This talk will present details from the very early days to the present of the project itself, and the meta-issues of how the project evolved, how the vendors almost killed it, how Google saved it, and how it is thriving: there are now more coreboot laptops than Mac laptops, for example.