Author: Carl-Daniel Hailfinger

TL;DR: Book your flights/hotel now and submit talks! More info at http://coreboot.org/Coreboot_conference_Bonn_2015

Dear vendors, developers, users and interested parties,

on behalf of the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) Germany I would like to invite you to the coreboot conference and developer meeting on October 9-11 2015 in Bonn, Germany.

This conference and developer meeting is geared towards manufacturers of hardware (processors, chipsets, mainboards and servers/ laptops/ tablets/ desktops/ appliances) as well as developers of firmware with an interest in coreboot and the possibilities it offers as well as (potential) coreboot users. Both professionals and hobbyists are invited.

The Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) in Germany will host the conference in Bonn, Germany. As the national cyber security authority, the goal of the BSI is to promote IT security in Germany. For this reason, the BSI has funded coreboot development in the past for security reasons.

The date of the coreboot conference is Friday October 9 to Sunday October 11, 2015. This is scheduled directly after Embedded Linux Conference Europe to make travel arrangements easier for people attending both events.

For the rest of the invitation letter, travel information, a call for presentations and more please see http://coreboot.org/Coreboot_conference_Bonn_2015

A highly unusual sight? Yes. A pink room filled to the brim with hardware, hackers and pizza boxes.
An unexpected place? Indeed. The architecture faculty building of the Czech Technical University in Prague.
An unusual schedule for four days in Prague? Of course. Intense hacking, talks, discussions and hardware destruction/modding.
Highly unusual sightseeing? Absolutely. A steam-powered wastewater treatment plant and the Prague Signal Festival.
Excellent food? Oh yes. Czech specialties at really low prices.
Disasters? Not really. There were canceled trains/planes from and to Prague affecting quite a few of the attendees, but those were eventually overcome.
Bad things? Possibly. We did unspeakable things to BIOS and EFI images, and we’re proud of it, so I’m not sure if that qualifies as bad.
Great meeting? Awesome meeting!

So what did we do?
– Found a way forward for the dozens of boards which haven’t been tested in ages.
– Overhauled the board status reporting model, so be implemented soon.
– Evaluated ways to get board testing into a state where people can do so easily without manual work.
– Discussed hardware vendor interaction.
– Agreed to ship verified boot functionality by default in a way which still keeps all the freedom for the user.
– coreboot will get a compelling security story out of the box.
– Fixed bugs in some ports.
– Ported a few new laptops.
– Learned new tricks to improve suspend-to-RAM functionality the easy way.
– Made a plan to upstream essential drivers in the chromiumos branch of flashrom.
– Adjusted the flashrom development model to something that works with the scarcity of reviewer time currently available.
– Found out that a video projector is a nice way to test VGA output in case the only VGA capable monitor is in use.
– Noticed that pretty much every question in the form of “does anybody have X” can be answered with “yes” if X is something that may be connected to a computer or is remotely useful for coreboot.
– Didn’t get a lot of sleep.
– Listened to talks about the present and future of coreboot.
– Met some longtime community members for the first time.

Photos of the meeting and sightseeing will be added soon.