How Can AMD EPYC "Rome" 7002 Series Be Even Better? Open-Source BIOS / Coreboot

[Danny3]

This is good news!

[bug77]

I'd rather have the publish full open specifications so anyone interested could work on it than a million of line code drop in 4 years when it is EOL.

Like the article says, you have to chase down ownership for a million things before you can do that
And when I said "do it right", I meant ensure it actually reaches motherboards you can buy, as opposed to something a hobbyist would tack onto one

[rene]

At least we didn't get the much loathed "we are constantly evaluating opportunities going forward bla, bla" phrase.
As for the timeline, I'd rather they do it right.

I'd rather have the publish full open specifications so anyone interested could work on it than a million of line code drop in 4 years when it is EOL.

[bug77]

I'll believe it when I see it.

Sounds like political-speak. "We're working on it". How many hundreds of times have we heard this from manufacturers over the years when asking them about open sourcing their binaries? Anyway, at least there's some slight reason to hope.

At least we didn't get the much loathed "we are constantly evaluating opportunities going forward bla, bla" phrase.
As for the timeline, I'd rather they do it right.

[andyprough]

I'll believe it when I see it.

Sounds like political-speak. "We're working on it". How many hundreds of times have we heard this from manufacturers over the years when asking them about open sourcing their binaries? Anyway, at least there's some slight reason to hope.

[wizard69]

This is good news! Success at AMD should allow them to start hiring more software engineers to get past this drought of software. In a nut shell money from success breeds more success as a companies capability grows.

As others have mentioned AMD would do well to become more involved in the boot software for consumer devices. The reason for me isn’t software security which I really don’t believe open source improves that much, but rather the rather pathetic way many manufactures these days handle BIOS updates for their AMD containing products. This especially seems to be a problem for laptops. I’m to the point where I’m more concerned about this, with AMD based products, than just about anything else.

In fact if AMD came out with their own product line, built around open source, I’d be in line to buy. That would be a laptop range and a desktop workstation range. Intel does NUC so this would only be slightly larger with a move into laptops. The industry needs to be steered in the right direction and AMD has the potential here to be in the drivers seat.

[kpedersen]

Yes, and preferably going forward as a stable supply of future hardware too. Not just releasing one very specific coreboot capable processor that we all have to look for and scrape at from ebay

[Termy]

Would be very appreciated!
Lets hope it's not a timeframe of years until they can do it - and that it is not only done for servers, but also for consumer hardware

[phoronix]

Phoronix: How Can AMD EPYC "Rome" 7002 Series Be Even Better? Open-Source BIOS / Coreboot

By now you've likely seen the fantastic performance out of AMD's new "Rome" 7002 series processors. The performance is phenomenal and generally blowing well past Intel's Xeon Cascade Lake processors. So that's all good and it can get even better outside of performance: I asked AMD about the prospects of Coreboot / open-source BIOS support and got a surprising response...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMD-EPYC-Coreboot-Open-Austin