# Welcome to OpenBIOS

The **OpenBIOS** project provides you with most free and open source
Open Firmware implementations available. Here you find several
implementations of IEEE 1275-1994 (Referred to as Open Firmware)
compliant firmware.

Among its features, Open Firmware provides an instruction set
independent device interface. This can be used to boot the operating
system from expansion cards without native initialization code.

It is Open Firmware's goal to work on all common platforms, like x86,
AMD64, PowerPC, ARM, Sparc and Mips. With its flexible and modular
design, Open Firmware targets servers, workstations and embedded
systems, where a sane and unified firmware is a crucial design goal and
reduces porting efforts noticably.

Open Firmware is found on many servers and workstations and
there are several commercial implementations from [SUN](OpenBOOT),
[Firmworks](Open_Firmware), [CodeGen](SmartFirmware), Apple, [IBM](SLOF)
and others.

In most cases, the Open Firmware implementations provided on this site
rely on an additional low-level firmware for hardware initialization,
such as [coreboot](http://www.coreboot.org/) or
[U-Boot](http://www.denx.de/wiki/U-Boot).

## Download
Get the latest version of OpenBIOS. See the [development download
page](OpenBIOS).  Have a look at the Implementations section on the
left side.

## Contact
The easiest way to get in contact with the OpenBIOS team is
to subscribe the OpenBIOS mailinglist. If you want to contribute to
OpenBIOS development, you should subscribe to the mailinglist as well.
See further information on the [Mailinglist](Mailinglist) page.

## Credits
Who are the people behind OpenBIOS? Who helped and contributed to make
OpenBIOS as successful as it is today. See the growing [Credits](Credits)
page for a (yet incomplete) list of people contributing to OpenBIOS with
hardware, patches, code, hints, etc.

## News
### OpenBIOS v1.1 released (2013-05-04)
After 4 years of hard work, the OpenBIOS team are proud to announce
the release of OpenBIOS 1.1. Since the last release, over 600 commits
have been made to the SVN repository with a wealth of improvements and
new features. As a result of these changes, the ability of OpenBIOS 1.1
to boot various kernels under QEMU has significantly improved. For more
information, please visit the [development page](OpenBIOS).

### OpenBIOS v1.0 released (2009-03-01)
OpenBIOS v1.0 has been released. For more information, please visit
the [development page](OpenBIOS).

### FCODE suite 1.0.2 released (2006-10-30)
[David Paktor](mailto:David@paktor.biz) added tracing support to the
[OpenBIOS FCODE suite](FCODE_suite).

### LinuxBIOS Symposium 2006 (2006-10-01)
The first European [LinuxBIOS Symposium
2006](http://www.coreboot.org/index.php/LinuxBIOS_Symposium_2006) took
place in Hamburg from October 1st to 3rd. This event was organized by
[coresystems GmbH](http://www.coresystems.de/).</p>

### FCODE suite 1.0.1 available (2006-09-21)
[David Paktor](mailto:David@paktor.biz), when he was with
the IBM Corporation, contributed to the [OpenBIOS FCODE suite](FCODE_suite).

This release has higher test coverage, a more detailed report on one
type of error, and removal of dead code and consolidation of some other
code.

### SUN released OpenBOOT source code (2006-09-06)
[SUN microsystems](http://www.sun.com/) has recently released their
OpenBOOT source code to the community under a BSD license. Go to their
[OpenSparc T1 website](http://opensparc-t1.sunsource.net/download_sw.html)
to download the full archive (190MB) or check out our [local
mirror](OpenBOOT) (1.7MB).

[older news](News)
