Coreboot 4.12 Released - Drops Older Intel / AMD Platforms

[madscientist159]

By the way I didn't see any RX 590 in the wiki, have you done any testing with it? Googling it didn't help.

While I haven't tried it personally, it's apparently based on the same Polaris core that we ship en masse with the WX<n>100 cards, and that the RX580 uses. I'd expect it to just work -- the only issues I've seen with AMD GPUs at this point center around some questionable code quality in relation to Navi and incorrect use of floating point in the kernel driver. Even that though is being fixed in (IIRC) Linux 5.6/5.7.

[angrypie]

Just saw this now. So I actually use a couple of these machines -- my daily driver is some RX5xx series card (I think it's a 580, lspci isn't too helpful), and the other one that's mainly used for video editing work is a Navi GPU on a large 4k display. I tend to use Debian (old habits) but Fedora is very nice on these machines too. Of course, there's the usual distros too -- Ubuntu, CentOS, RHEL, Gentoo, Void, and some lesser known ones like Adelie Linux. Overall distro support is really good IMO, definitely the best out of any open ISA...

By the way I didn't see any RX 590 in the wiki, have you done any testing with it? Googling it didn't help.

[andyprough]

Just saw this now. So I actually use a couple of these machines -- my daily driver is some RX5xx series card (I think it's a 580, lspci isn't too helpful), and the other one that's mainly used for video editing work is a Navi GPU on a large 4k display. I tend to use Debian (old habits) but Fedora is very nice on these machines too. Of course, there's the usual distros too -- Ubuntu, CentOS, RHEL, Gentoo, Void, and some lesser known ones like Adelie Linux. Overall distro support is really good IMO, definitely the best out of any open ISA...

Very good info, thank you for this. I did not know so many distros were working well with the Raptor systems, and it is good to hear that some AMD cards are working. Appreciate it.

[madscientist159]

I looked at it last year and wasn't happy with the available distros or the available graphics card drivers at the time. Can you tell us which distro you are using and which graphic card? Thanks!

Just saw this now. So I actually use a couple of these machines -- my daily driver is some RX5xx series card (I think it's a 580, lspci isn't too helpful), and the other one that's mainly used for video editing work is a Navi GPU on a large 4k display. I tend to use Debian (old habits) but Fedora is very nice on these machines too. Of course, there's the usual distros too -- Ubuntu, CentOS, RHEL, Gentoo, Void, and some lesser known ones like Adelie Linux. Overall distro support is really good IMO, definitely the best out of any open ISA...

[scratchi]

I completely agree with you on security aspect. This is just on a desktop that I use for experimenting/testing; not a production server or laptop that has valuable data on it.

[NotMine999]

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

Oh wun-der-ful. Yet another security vector that needs to be scrutinized very carefully.

"Oh-Gee-Wow" should never replace "Oh-Wait-What".

Just because it's buried in the BIOS doesn't mean it can't be exploited by some crafty hacker for nefarious purposes.

[Adarion]

...

Thanks for shedding more light on the situation.
I was guessing that more resources of the Coreboot team will go to Crombooks and we still have a lot of normal boards that would need a little polish (e.g. not having PS/2 kbd, no STR and the likes). But hopefully CPU vendors will wake up and also invest in a freedom firmware. It's just the better thing.

[Paradigm Shifter]

Sure, I just disagreed with the first "new" in new-CPU-new-socket-new-chipset

Ah, I see. With "new" I meant new purchase for end user, rather than new technology, etc. But your reading also works well.

[caligula]

Forgive me if I'm reading this wrong, but basically this is agreeing with my subtle point about double standards?

Sure, I just disagreed with the first "new" in new-CPU-new-socket-new-chipset

[Paradigm Shifter]

FWIW, Intel is sellling the same 14nm++++++ chip year after year. Is this fifth "generation" (= higher stock overlocking) of 14nm skylake already?

Forgive me if I'm reading this wrong, but basically this is agreeing with my subtle point about double standards?

And to be honest I've stopped keeping track of Intel's 14nm shenanigans. They've missed their 10nm roadmap targets so many times now I remain shocked that investors haven't started kicking up a fuss. But then I remember that investors are, by and large, not engineering inclined and only care about profits...