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Intro

This document aims to compare the openness of Dasharo Firmware and Insyde BIOS.

There is an ongoing discussion about the methodology of the openness metric.

BIOS versions used in the analysis

Insyde BIOS

In the case of the Insyde bios, the entire image should be considered proprietary. There are several parts of the image that have a well-known structure or make use of a public standard. However, to decode these structures, one needs to employ reverse-engineering tools and techniques to know what structures are present.

Dasharo BIOS

CBFS

image size (bytes) Is it open-source?
cbfs master header 20h Yes
fallback/romstage 14770h Yes
cpu_microcode_blob.bin 31C00h No
intel_fit 50h Yes
fallback/ramstage 1E626h Yes
config 579h Yes
revision 351h Yes
build_info 5Dh Yes
fallback/dsdt.aml 6233h Yes
vbt.bin 51Ch Yes
(empty) 1E4h N/A
fspm.bin 9F000h No
cmos_layout.bin 22Ch Yes
(empty) D24h N/A
fsps.bin 43676h No
fallback/postcar 8F24h Yes
fallback/payload 1771C5h Yes
fallback/verstage 12C80h Yes
(empty) 10E5E4h N/A
bootblock 74C0h Yes
Summary 3F7A33h In 62.9%

Open and closed source images are in the table below.

type summarised size Percent
open-source 1D42D1h 62.9%
closed-source 114276h 37.1%
empty (not included) 10F4ECh

Whole flash image

region size open-source percent (bytes)
descriptor 1000h 0%
ME 4FF000h 0%
BIOS B00000h 62.9%
Summary 1000000h 43.2%

Summary

image open-source percent (bytes)
Insyde 0%
Dasharo 43.2%