Qubes OS summit 2022

Dasharo vs vendor firmware performance on QubesOS - a comparison
2022-09-10, 17:10–17:40 (Europe/Berlin), Main Room

The presentation will compare performance between Dasharo and Vendor BIOSes
on Dasharo-supported platforms, in the context of QubesOS usage. I will attempt
to present the most significant differences that an end user user will see when
installing Dasharo over the original proprietary firmware.


Users of open firmware often face a reduction in feature set and performance of
the platform when migrating from vendor-provided, optimized, proprietary BIOS.
Modern platforms feature a multitude of performance, power and thermal knobs
that are sometimes not very well documented, and it requires a lot of time and
experience to tune them for a specific mainboard.

In this presentation I will present actual difference in performance as measured
by a set of benchmarks, talk about what causes them and what challenges there
are to bring performance to a state that is competitive with the vendor BIOS.
We'll also discuss how these differences may impact QubesOS users.