> Why Linux? You already have Linux for OS, why the same on firmware? The Linux they're flashing to the firmware ROM is a custom minimal build. Using that, the

> Why Linux? You already have Linux for OS, why the same on firmware? The Linux they're flashing to the firmware ROM is a custom minimal build. Using that, they can then boot a standard distro kernel. And depending on your threat model, you might not need to update the firmware kernel as often as the distro kernel, as it's only used for booting. Note that this is for servers; for an embedded system you might as well boot directly to the final kernel. > Why not Minix? ( Used in Intel Me Already ) Why not OpenBSD? ( Very Secure ) Why not NetBSD? ( Extremely Portable ) Why not FreeBSD? A few guesses: - Linux is the one most familiar to the developers of this. And to the Google sysadmins, presumably. - Compatibility: If the distro kernel resides on, say, an XFS filesystem on an MD-RAID device, the firmware boot kernel needs drivers for that. - It uses kexec which is a quick and easy way to boot a Linux kernel from another Linux kernel. If you want to boot from another OS you'd have to figure out something else. > Why not Coreboot? Coreboot is preferable, but since the low-level firmware on modern x86 server platforms is tightly controlled with hardware signing keys, no data sheets released etc., coreboot hasn't been able to run on an Intel x86 server platform for the past decade. This project (NERF) is a pragmatic compromise, by replacing only the upper parts of the firmware stack and removing/disabling the ME as much as possible. > Why not the OpenSource UEFI implmentation? It's designed-by-committee crap which is far less battle tested than Linux. > Why not switch back to simple and easy BIOS? It's less evil than UEFI sure, but I guess it's unfortunately only a question of time until it's removed from PC firmwares (Apple already did it many years ago, AFAIU). Besides, AFAIK switching to BIOS mode does nothing to disable the ME. And if you're going to do something from scratch, you might as well use something sane like coreboot.