Firmware-action is a tool to simplify building firmware. Think of it as Makefile or Taskfile but specifically for firmware. The tool it-self is written entirely in Golang.
Motivation behind the creation is to unify building of firmware across development environments. The goal of firmware-action is to run on your local machine but also in your CI/CD pipeline, with the same configuration producing the same output.
There is also an independent python tool to prepare Docker containers to be used with firmware-action. These are hosted on GitHub and are freely available (no need to build any Docker containers yourself).
There is also a GitHub action integration allowing you to use firmware-action in your GitHub CI/CD.
At the moment firmware-action has modules to build:
- coreboot
- linux
- tianocore / edk2
- firmware stitching (populating IFD regions with binaries)
- u-root
- u-boot
- universal module (run arbitrary commands in arbitrary Docker container)
This list should expand in the future (see issue 56).
Firmware-action is using dagger under the hood, which makes it a rather versatile tool. When firmware-action is used, it automatically downloads user-specified Docker containers in which it will attempt to build the firmware.
If your firmware consists of multiple components, such as coreboot with linux as the payload, you can simply define each as a module and define dependency between them. Each module is built separately, but can use the output of another module as input. In the coreboot + linux example, you can call firmware-action to build coreboot recursively, which will also build linux due to the dependency definition. This way, you can build complex stacks of firmware in a single call.
Documentation is hosted in pages.
There is a standalone repository with usage examples at firmware-action-example.
Pre-compiled coreboot toolchains for docker containers are stored in separate directory firmware-action-toolchains.
We maintain multiple containers that can be freely used with firmware-action. They are hosted both in GitHub registry as well as in DockerHub.
DockerHub registry contains only releases, while GitHub registry contains also containers build on main branch.
Here is a list of all containers:
| Container | Maintained | Note |
|---|---|---|
| coreboot_4.19 | [x] | |
| coreboot_4.20 | [ ] | discontinued in favor of 4.20.1 |
| coreboot_4.20.1 | [x] | |
| coreboot_4.21 | [x] | |
| coreboot_4.22 | [ ] | discontinued in favor of 4.22.1 |
| coreboot_4.22.01 | [x] | |
| coreboot_24.02 | [ ] | discontinued in favor of 24.02.01 |
| coreboot_24.02.01 | [x] | |
| coreboot_24.05 | [x] | |
| udk2017 | [x] | |
| edk2-stable202008 | [x] | |
| edk2-stable202105 | [x] | |
| edk2-stable202111 | [x] | |
| edk2-stable202205 | [x] | |
| edk2-stable202208 | [x] | |
| edk2-stable202211 | [x] | |
| edk2-stable202302 | [x] | |
| edk2-stable202305 | [x] | |
| edk2-stable202308 | [x] | |
| edk2-stable202311 | [x] | |
| edk2-stable202402 | [x] | |
| edk2-stable202405 | [x] | |
| edk2-stable202408 | [ ] | discontinued in favor of stable202408.01 |
| edk2-stable202408.01 | [x] | |
| edk2-stable202411 | [x] | |
| linux_6.1.111 | [ ] | discontinued in favor of linux_6.1 |
| linux_6.1.45 | [ ] | discontinued in favor of linux_6.1 |
| linux_6.1 | [x] | |
| linux_6.6.52 | [ ] | discontinued in favor of linux_6.6 |
| linux_6.6 | [x] | |
| linux_6.9.9 | [ ] | discontinued because not LTS |
| linux_6.11 | [ ] | discontinued because not LTS |
| linux_6.12 | [x] | |
| uroot_0.14.0 | [x] | |
| uboot_2025.01 | [x] |
These were created by hand long time ago and since then have been replaced.
| Container | Maintained | Note |
|---|---|---|
| coreboot | [ ] | discontinued |
| uefi | [ ] | discontinued |