There's huge potential for this 'unbrickable' open source BIOS now it's running on modern Intel PCs
A motherboard's BIOS is often seen as sacrosanct in how it offers low-level control over a gaming PC. However, turns out that's actually not true, and your motherboard's BIOS is just as open to fiddling with as any other PC part. If you're brave enough.
An open source Linux consulting company called 3mdeb has successfully loaded an open source BIOS, called Coreboot, and a firmware distribution framework of its own creation, called Dasharo, onto a modern Intel Alder Lake Z690 motherboard from MSI.
It's done so in hope of offering even greater control over the fundamental PC software to the end user with the open source BIOS software.
Coreboot is a like-for-like replacement for your BIOS/UEFI firmware running on your motherboard by default. It's designed by various engineers, some who reportedly also have worked on the Linux kernel, and is intended to open the door to cross-vendor, cross-platform improvements to the BIOS firmware that's both faster and more secure than traditional vendor-specific versions. You can read all about Coreboot and recent efforts to bring it to modern chips in this Reddit thread or how Coreboot works with various user interfaces, called payloads, here.
A few key benefits of Coreboot: it is «unbrickable», meaning updating the firmware should no longer put your PC in any danger; it's secure with a minimal Trusted Computing Base; it's designed to boot super quickly, in under a second; and you can load up your own boot splash screen jpeg. That last one is of the utmost importance.
One of the largest users of Coreboot today, which you might recognise, is Google for its Chromebook devices.
Linux experts Phoronix note that Coreboot has been in the past limited to much older equipment, however, and
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