coreboot (formerly known as LinuxBIOS) is a Free Software project aimed at replacing the proprietary BIOS (firmware) you can find in most of today's computers.
I had this running about 10 years back, and the number of boards it covers is a little bigger now but still small. Odd mix of supercomputer and embedded users. I wonder if any of the large cloud providers are using it, as it is much more reliable than a BIOS which can fail in so many ways.
I'm guessing that doing init work on 3rd party expansion cards is left up to the OS. This makes sense, but might be troublesome for poorly designed adapters...
The traditional x86 hardware init scheme is to run x86 machine code from ROM's on the expansion cards. This of course limits the cards to only being used in machines that can execute x86 machine code.
Open Firmware replaces this with Forth code on the card and a Forth interpreter. This is how PowerPC Macs and Sun Sparc hardware would load card drivers.
EFI's driver functionality is pretty much the same as Open Firmware, except it uses an EFI Byte Code (EBC) as it's language.
Anything has to be better than the giant mess which is EFI. EFI is worse in just about every way than the BIOS, which is quite an achievement considering how everyone hates the BIOS.
Incredible complex. Rarely works. Doesn't solve any problems of the BIOS (with the exception of the 2TB disk limit, but that could have been solved more easily).
coreboot (formerly known as LinuxBIOS) is a Free Software project aimed at replacing the proprietary BIOS (firmware) you can find in most of today's computers.