Glossary

After years of providing services and products on firmware market we recognize that it is poisoned by incorrect and confusing terminology. In following glossary we would like to explain most used terms from Dasharo Documentation. We try to refer to standards, literature and community best practices to keep content added by us minimalistic.

Embedded Firmware

We use definition explained in first chapter of "Embedded Firmware Solutions" book by Jiming Sun, Marc Jones, Stefan Reinauer and Vincent Zimmer.

Firmware is "layer of software between the hardware and the operating system (OS), with the main purpose to initialize and abstract enough hardware so that the operating systems and their drivers can further configure the hardware to its full functionality."

Rising complexity of hardware initialization and need for its manageability created need for BMC (Board Management Controllers), EC (Environmental Controllers) and even more specialized one like USB Power Delivery firmware. What may make that firmware also covered by above definition.

Dasharo Hardware Compatibility List Report

Dasharo HCL Report dumps most important information about platform and backup SPI NOR flash. Gathered information can be used for future analysis, debugging and recovery. Optionally scripts upload dump to Dasharo HCL Backup Server, so Dasharo Team can improve open source firmware product line and support customers in case of issues.

As temporary solution we use 3mdeb NextCloud as Dasharo HCL Backup Server.

Dasharo HCL Reports are also used during open source firmware port feasibilty analysis, so if you are interested in Dasharo support for your hardware, feel free to reach us.

Please note Dasharo HCL Report may contain sensitive information like serial numbers. Please do not make this information public. Dasharo Team respect your privacy.

Dasharo Blobs Transmission

Unfortunately, some hardware platforms cannot be fully functional without binary blobs in the firmware. Some binary blobs have no EULA or any other license discussing redistributability. To avoid issues, Dasharo Blobs Transmission scripts extract blobs from SPI NOR flash backup and patch Dasharo open-source firmware distribution before initial deployment.

Dasharo Openness Score

Dasharo Openness Score is an utility, which parses the firmware images to calculate the amount of bytes produced from open-source code. It is able to parse both Dasharo/coreboot images and proprietary UEFI images. That said, it can be used to compare how open the Dasharo images are versus the proprietary versions.

Dasharo Openness Score may also refer to the report produced by the Dasharo Openness Score utility. Such reports are being published in the platform directories in this repository. If you are interested in Dasharo Openness Score for you boards, please reach us. Example Dasharo Openness Score report can be found here

You can also find an Openness Score comparison table in the Supported hardware overview section. It shows the comparison of binary openness between Dasharo and proprietary firmware.