SeaBIOS can either run on bare hardware as a coreboot payload, or can be used directly in emulators such as QEMU and Bochs.

Initially, SeaBIOS was based on the open-source BIOS implementation included with the Bochs emulator.

The project was created with intentions to allow native usage on x86 hardware, and to be based on an improved and more easily extendable internal source code implementation.

[4] Most of the SeaBIOS source code is written in C, with its build system relying on the standard GNU toolchain.

[2]: 5–7  SeaBIOS has been tested with various bootloaders and operating systems, including GNU GRUB, LILO, SYSLINUX, Microsoft Windows, Linux, FreeDOS, FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD.