How “open source” is the Minnowboard?
This week, Intel announced the Minnowboard, a small embedded development board akin to the RaspberryPi, BeagleBoard and similar devices. The point that grabbed my attention is that it’s being touted as an “open source computer”. The device is shipped running Ångström and is compatible with the Yocto project for building custom embedded Linux systems, but while there are many devices available that run Linux, the term “open source computer” is seldom bandied about. So just how “open source” is the Minnowboard?
For a start, the board uses Intel chips, which is usually a good sign that the drivers required will be open source, without requiring any binary blobs in the Linux kernel. Furthermore, the UEFI system is open source. This is the code which executes when the computer first powers up and launches the operating system’s boot loader, and making this open source allows hackers to write their own pre-OS applications and utilities for the Intel platform, an opportunity we don’t often see on consumer devices.