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. It performs just a little bit of hardware initialization and then executes a so-called payload.
With this separation of hardware initialization and later boot logic, coreboot is capable of scaling from specialized applications run directly from firmware, operating systems in Flash, and custom bootloaders to implementations of firmware standards like PCBIOS and EFI without having to carry features not necessary in the target application, reducing the amount of code and flash space required.
Source:
http://www.coreboot.org
