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Coreboot 4.12 Released - Drops Older Intel / AMD Platforms

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  • #11
    Originally posted by madscientist159 View Post

    Agreed -- that's why we invested so heavily in OpenPOWER. Fully open firmware from the factory, no mysterious ME/PSP type management binaries, and an open ISA too. You might want to take a look at the Blackbird for a (relatively) low cost entry point...I use one as my daily driver, quite happy with it overall!
    I've already considered it but, sadly, I don't live in the US, importing this would cost me several organs.

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    • #12
      Originally posted by angrypie View Post
      That's a bullshit excuse and AMD knows it. Whoever is in charge of their PR needs to get shot.
      So childish.

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      • #13
        Originally posted by andyprough View Post
        So childish.
        Found the fanboy.

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        • #14
          Originally posted by angrypie View Post

          Found the fanboy.
          It's been SOP with Intel for a long time that new CPU requires new motherboard. Well, not really requires, as demonstrated by people getting chips working on boards that aren't officially supported, but few people seem to complain about that. Or how about when Intel decided to change the electrical layout of socket 775 so the new chips would fry if dropped into an older board? That was fun trying to explain to a (supposedly) tech savvy family member. Or the extremely short-lived socket 423 for Pentium 4?

          It is understandable that people aren't happy, but it's now May 2020, AMD promised support for AM4 "through 2020"... and Ryzen 4000 still isn't out. So while I wouldn't say that AMD have abided by the implications of their statement (made in 2017 at the launch of AM4, IIRC) they haven't really broken their word. I've got an X370 board that (depending on what BIOS I update to) I can drop any CPU from three iterations of the Zen architecture into it and it'll work. I'm working really hard to come up with reasons not to drop a 3700X into said X370 board, beyond "don't really want to spend money now" (which, to be fair, is winning)...

          A lot of this seems to be modern internet drama of people who just want something to complain about. Outside of enthusiast fora, I don't know any people who bought a Ryzen 1000 series with B350/X370 board and upgraded to either Ryzen 2000 or Ryzen 3000. Even among my tech enthusiast friends, I'm the only one to have dropped a 3900X into an X470 board. Others jumped on "PCI-E 4! Oh! Shiny!" and did the Intel-trained whole-platform shift.

          Honestly, I could find more sympathy with the complainers if they had likewise lambasted Intel every time they pulled the similar trick. But on other fora, the most vocal condemntations of AMD for this come from the same people who either support Intel's new-CPU-new-socket-new-chipset strategy or at best mumbled something about "well it's best to get the fully compatible chipset anyway..."

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          • #15
            Paradigm Shifter Personally I never approved of Intel's shenanigans with sockets and chipsets. The last Intel CPU I bought was a Pentium 3.

            We're a year or two away from DDR5/PCIe5, why not extend support a little bit and save a few million dollars on platform validation? The chiplet design means they have a lot more flexibility than Intel in this regard. The Threadripper situation was already a bit embarrassing, but at least they didn't promise anything with regard to socket compatibility.

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            • #16
              Aye, I agree. I know how I'd approach it, but then I am not a C-suite of a multinational corporation.

              I've never been too fussed overall, because with the exception of early-days, when I basically picked up whatever I could as cheap as I could, I've always worked to a budget for a whole system, and the old box has been relegated to support duty or given to family or friends. The dependence on whole-platform upgrades probably meant I spent less than I otherwise would have done; because I wasn't upgrading incrementally the sticker shock was big enough to delay major purchases.

              I suspect a lot of it was the apparent misstep of using Asmedia for the early chipsets, which AMD appeared to realise and took in-house for X570? Hopefully when DDR5 does land, AMD will take the opportunity to adjust a little further. Mandating that BIOS chips have to be above a certain capacity would help - then it doesn't turn into a game of "how many CPUs can we support in the space we have available?"

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              • #17
                Originally posted by angrypie View Post

                That's a bullshit excuse and AMD knows it. Whoever is in charge of their PR needs to get shot.

                Anyway, I don't think you can work around AGESA/PSP on anything post-AM3+, and pestering AMD to open up AGESA again might not work.
                This is why I started a poll on reddit, but on r/Amd or r/hardware each such pettition for open-sourcing BIOS and docs needed for it got deleted pretty much IMMEDIATELY.


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                • #18
                  Originally posted by scratchi View Post
                  Updated my Asus board, works good

                  Code:
                  # dmidecode 3.2
                  Getting SMBIOS data from sysfs.
                  SMBIOS 2.8 present.
                  14 structures occupying 643 bytes.
                  Table at 0x7FF4B020.
                  
                  Handle 0x0000, DMI type 0, 26 bytes
                  BIOS Information
                  Vendor: coreboot
                  Version: 4.12-2-gd82c7d24ff-dirty
                  Release Date: 05/12/2020
                  ROM Size: 8192 kB
                  Characteristics:
                  PCI is supported
                  PC Card (PCMCIA) is supported
                  BIOS is upgradeable
                  Selectable boot is supported
                  ACPI is supported
                  Targeted content distribution is supported
                  BIOS Revision: 4.12
                  Firmware Revision: 0.0
                  
                  Handle 0x0001, DMI type 1, 27 bytes
                  System Information
                  Manufacturer: ASUS
                  Product Name: P8H61-M PRO
                  Version: 1.0
                  Serial Number: Scratchi67
                  UUID: Not Settable
                  Wake-up Type: Reserved
                  SKU Number: Not Specified
                  Family: Not Specified
                  How well does it work? How fast is the boot time?

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                  • #19
                    Originally posted by sandy8925 View Post

                    How well does it work? How fast is the boot time?
                    I didn't measure actual boot time, but it's definitely faster than the stock Asus BIOS. I think other then the default seabios menu and grub timeout values, it would be pretty much instant to kernel boot (I'm using hdd, so OS boot time is a different story). I like to have those default values to access those menus when I need them though.

                    In terms of stability, it's been solid. Playing games, compiling stuff and surfing with 10+ tabs in various browsers, no issues. Which isn't shocking, because once the system boots and OS takes over, coreboot shouldn't impact anything beyond that. It boots every time I turn on the PC, so I guess it's safe to call it stable

                    What I really like to show off to people is KolibriOS inside the BIOS. It's a small OS that fits on a 1.44MB floppy, so you can append the floppy image to your coreboot rom and seabios will load it from the rom. It takes like 2-3 seconds to boot (I'm using a crusty old pentium, might be faster on better proc), connects to network, has bunch of small games, text editor, webview browser and some other stuff. If it only had an SSH client, that would be really sweet. But good payload to have incase the SSD/HDD pops, you can still have a somewhat working PC with no disk...good enough to at least boot into as a sanity check to make sure nothing else on the PC is busted. I like it

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                    • #20
                      wait a second, i thought coreboot supports nothing but old platforms

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