Another Micro-ATX Haswell Era Motherboard Working With Coreboot But Needs Tiny Blob

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Another Micro-ATX Haswell Era Motherboard Working With Coreboot But Needs Tiny Blob

There are many Sandy Bridge era motherboards that have been freed by Coreboot while if you are looking for more options on something (slightly) newer, a micro-ATX Haswell-era motherboard from ASRock now works under this open-source BIOS implementation...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Coreboot-ASRock-H81M-HDS

[rabcor]

The current Coreboot port also doesn't allow discrete GPUs to be used and there is no automatic fan control currently provided.

Lol, I suppose they tried at least.

[pgeorgi]

Lol, I suppose they tried at least.

Development is iterative. Patches accepted.

[michaelb1]

> ... But Needs Tiny Blob
> 200 KB
> Tiny Blob

Sorry but I wouldn't call it tiny - because the whole coreboot build is less than 1MB at many boards
(not counting the FF's padding which increases it to BIOS chip size)

200 KB is a lot, especially since there's a significant hardware init code inside. Intel is hiding something -
- either backdoors, or ashamed to show their crappy code written overseas at coding sweatshops,
its bad in any case. Luckily there are some not-Intel coreboot supported boards or Core2Duo librebooted

[kgardas]

System agent binary? Is that IntelME or equivalent firmware? That would be deal breaker I'm afraid.

[michaelb1]

System agent binary? Is that IntelME or equivalent firmware? That would be deal breaker I'm afraid.

Friend, if you are interested at coreboot opensource BIOS but don't want to deal with this Intel crap, you might want to take a look at coreboot-supported AMD laptops/desktop/servers. I am using AMD Lenovo G505S quadcore A10-5750M laptop with 16 GB RAM installed, very happy with it even at performance heavy workloads - and it doesn't have neither Intel ME (obviously) nor AMD PSP hardware backdoor, also safe from Intel-specific vulnerabilities like Meltdown so don't need those performance-crippling patches. Also, this G505S could be bought at some fleabay in good condition for like $100-$150 - these are really affordable prices compared to significantly more expensive Intel thinkpads.

G505S factory installed thermal paste was crap and became a fossil after a few years, now a lot of people are selling them for cheap because of thermal problems - not knowing they could be easily fixed by cleaning and thermal paste replacement. So I hope you could consider this variant if you are tired of Intel crap. One note: there were some G505S versions with weaker A8/A6 CPUs, make sure it has A10-5750M ; also, some G505S have a discrete GPU (either HD 8570M or R5 M230) while some other only have CPU's integrated HD 8650G - and recently we got a discrete GPU working at coreboot - so it might make sense to hunt for A10-5750M + discrete GPU version of G505S. If you have any questions about this wonderful laptop and its' coreboot, I'm always happy to help you ;-)