This post is a summary of my talk at FOSDEM’18 and was originally posted on Scaleway’s blog.

At Scaleway we started to design our servers with the ARM C1.
Later we switched to a x86 architecture to provide the C2 and Dedibox SC2016.

On x86 a BIOS is required to start the server. BIOS software got many legacy and backward compatible software to ensure a reliable behavior across many boards. I was in charge of the BIOS development for our new generation of x86 servers.

This article presents technical choices we used during our development.
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