Coreboot 4.12 Released - Drops Older Intel / AMD Platforms

[pgeorgi]

It's very sad to see more and more boards and systems / CPUs / chipsets dropped from Coreboot's active support.
It is okay if enterprises support FOSS development, but IMO Google's influence here becomes unhealthy.

The removal of FSP 1.0 and Agesa code wasn't driven by Google but by community members (mostly two: one affiliated to a smaller corporate coreboot developer/user, the other one with no corporate affiliation) who were unhappy about having to work around less than stellar chipset code that nobody cared enough to clean up. SInce they had a pretty good argument on their side, and because nobody stepped up and provided a fix for the older chipsets, they were dropped. We'd accept patches that bring them back, but it's unlikely to happen given that this task won't become easier with every month that the codebase diverges from the point where these chipsets were dropped, and nobody did it when it was still "easy" (i.e. when the code was still in the tree).

All the additions seem to be more and more Chrombook focused and there is not time for anything else. That sucks. Besides, this older HW might sometimes even be better supported.

How is the increase of work on Chromebooks taking away time from anything else? One feature of 4.12 is out-of-the-box measured boot support which apparently will end up in https://github.com/osresearch/heads. That measured boot stuff is an extension of the Chrome OS initiated verified boot library, code contributed by developers not affiliated to Chrome OS, and not used by Chrome OS.

But then, it would also be about time for all those CPU and mainboard vendors to support Coreboot development (again).

Besides some _ancient_ Tyan boards (around 2005 or so?) which were already only semi-official if I remember correctly (I think the terms were along the lines of "we don't mind what internal datasheets you read in your spare time, but that project is not affiliated with us"), I think the first mainboard vendor that the general IT public may have heard of (there were a few specialist shops shipping coreboot more than 10 years ago) to really support coreboot was Google with the first Chromebooks that ran coreboot.

The AMD support for AGESA was certainly nicer than what we have today by CPU vendors in that they scrubbed internal code for a fully open source release, but there are probably more engineers from CPU vendors involved in coreboot development today than AMD had firmware engineers in total back then. So all in all, a mixed bag. Fully open source firmware definitely remains the goal, but that part of the computing space sadly isn't very conductive to it, and hardware is only getting more complex, so achieving that goal remains an uphill struggle.

(Full Disclosure: I work on coreboot as part of the Chrome OS firmware team, although not when the decision for coreboot was made or even with the first few generations of Chromebooks. I worked on coreboot in other companies before that. I also managed a few coreboot releases, including the just-announced 4.12.)

[angrypie]

Coreboot on x86 is like putting lipstick on a pig. We need a true open platform.

[scratchi]

Updated my Asus board, works good

# 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

[Adarion]

It's very sad to see more and more boards and systems / CPUs / chipsets dropped from Coreboot's active support.
It is okay if enterprises support FOSS development, but IMO Google's influence here becomes unhealthy. All the additions seem to be more and more Chrombook focused and there is not time for anything else. That sucks. Besides, this older HW might sometimes even be better supported.
But then, it would also be about time for all those CPU and mainboard vendors to support Coreboot development (again).

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Coreboot 4.12 Released - Drops Older Intel / AMD Platforms

Coreboot 4.12 is out today as the latest version of this open-source BIOS / system firmware implementation that saw more than 2,600 commits since the previous release...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Coreboot-4.12-Released