Tan Lean Sheng
Sheng is a BIOS engineer working on Coreboot and Slim Bootloader projects after joining Intel in 2017. Sheng has a keen interest in firmware development. Outside of work Sheng is a tech geek and enjoys playing Frisbee.
Coreboot Lite/Rampayload and Linuxboot
The coreboot ramstage was created because Linux could not correctly a PCI bus in
1999.
Since then, the ramstage has grown in complexity and, in conjunction with depth
charge, is well on the way to becoming a small kernel.
At the 2018 OSFC Minnich[?] suggested that we might consider making the ramstage optional, since he had found that some im some ports (RISCV) and some situations
(linuxboot) it was no longer needed, and it was a significant burden in terms of boot speed
and code.
Intel and Google have been studying this idea. In this talk we discuss our exploration
into making the ramstage optional. There is a significant boot time performance improvement.