The Latest Open-Source AMD Firmware / Coreboot Happenings In Early 2021

[pal666]

So again why would a major OEM spend all the money to go Coreboot other than to satisfy a small libre community?

i'd gladly pay $100 extra for coreboot motherboard. even small libre community will pay for development and then oem will get usual benefits of less maintenance, less bugs, better features

[pal666]

Also some of us are forced to dual boot (that paycheck thing)

i doubt it requires dualboot

[creoflux]

Yeah, but big server/data center companies have millions/billions of dollars of clout, and can get secret access to UEFI code for customisation and deployment, under NDA. We normal users can't.

I don't know enough about this space to know about this, but it sounds pretty probable that they could get access to UEFI. However, not sure why the base UEFI would not have better performance if it was possible for big data center companies to tune improvements once they have the source code.

[archsway]

It is also suppose to handle errors better. For servers, this has obvious benefits because that was the entire motivation of the project originally of having them come back online quicker and handle errors differently.

Coreboot's reliability is also useful for CI farms where the device needs to be rebooted for every test. If you look at the devices used for CI in Mesa, Chromebooks feature heavily because UEFI-based systems fail to boot too often.

[f0rmat]

i doubt it requires dualboot

I hope that you are right.

[edwaleni]

i'd gladly pay $100 extra for coreboot motherboard. even small libre community will pay for development and then oem will get usual benefits of less maintenance, less bugs, better features

Linksys pushed out their GPL changes for the Broadcom based WRT and it blossomed into an entire side load industry. Sales very much went up as people wanted to take advantage of the opportunity. But their warranty expenses tripled as noobs consistently bricked their routers and returned them to Circuit City/Best Buy/CompUSA and took advantage of generous return policies.

I remember walking through a warehouse at a now defunct retailer and there were 2 large groups of shelves containing hundreds and hundreds of white boxes. I asked him what all that was? He said those are Linksys WRT's that were bricked and returned, subsequently reflashed and reboxed and being sold as refurbished. Key item on the box was "30 day warranty" so Linksys didn't have to repeat the cycle.

So now i come back to a large OEM, and someone puts out a new EFI based on Coreboot and someone on Reddit or TikTok says it makes your gaming 200% better. A new sideload industry begins to blossom and that OEM is now suddenly confronted with a large warranty expense because once again thousands of noobs thought they were going to get 2 more fps in Call of Duty and end up with a non-bootable system and end up at the Geek Squad desk looking to dump their mistake.

Again I get the benefit of Coreboot being available to anyone, but until an OEM finally does what Linksys did years ago, they came out with a WRT that was expressly designed and sold to be sideloaded. Perhaps an OEM will feel adventurous and create a SKU that is "Coreboot Only".

[Teggs]

...AMD has been crushing it... ...and generally delivering good launch-day support...

I would say they have been delivering better launch day support. They have gone from 'Compile from Git' and 'Use AMDGPU-Pro' and 'lol doesn't boot on Ubuntu 19.04' to 'available as an update to certain distros'. It's a pleasant change and a sign of an ongoing effort in the right direction. But I won't call the overall launch experience 'good' until users can purchase hardware on release day and use it with almost any distro. That seems like a reasonable expectation to me. Intel manages this, AMD can do this. Everyone already does this for Windows.

As for Coreboot, I would imagine vendors would like to have a common platform that requires less individual investment from each of them, instead of them alone having to create and maintain every one of their BIOSs. They would lose an arena for competition, but honestly most users don't even know or care about that. They only notice when their machine defecates on boot or, worse, bricks - possibly because an OS developer didn't know some quirk of some individual BIOS. Basically, it seems to me that boards would be more stable and cheaper to develop and maintain with cross-industry support of Coreboot, while losing little of value even to the board-makers.

[pgeorgi]

does anybody know if this will work with Windows?

It's generally possible to boot Windows with coreboot, both in PCBIOS and UEFI modes. This requires some care with the configuration that has to be done for each individual board and not all (as in: only a few) coreboot developers verify their work with Windows.

So yes, possible, but some boards may require some development effort.

[f0rmat]

It's generally possible to boot Windows with coreboot, both in PCBIOS and UEFI modes. This requires some care with the configuration that has to be done for each individual board and not all (as in: only a few) coreboot developers verify their work with Windows.

So yes, possible, but some boards may require some development effort.

Thanks for the insight.

[ezekrb5]

As a Lenovo product manager told me, "what value does Coreboot provide?...Lenovo already owns or has rights to any EFI or BIOS structure it desires and can modify it to any customer requirement"

The benefit of using Coreboot for end users is well understood, but outside Google, what would drive them (or any other large vendor) to embrace it?

There is no money in it for them.

It has no warranty improvement benefits.

It doesn't extend/reduce the life of the hardware in any fashion (unless misconfigured)

A majority of customers use EFI/BIOS in consumer perhaps once maybe twice in the devices' lifetime. Traditional consumers rarely patch.

In the business space, perhaps a little more than that, at setup, for a repair or a patch event.

In other words, unless someone demands it (like Google) there is no biz case.

So again why would a major OEM spend all the money to go Coreboot other than to satisfy a small libre community?

The same granularity on the system handling can be achieved with coreboot as well, (for example on System's76 utility).

However the main reason to want coreboot is the security and privacy implication, the amount of vulnerabilities found in closed source firmware is HUGE. Also it forbids the user the ability to stop the intel management engine/ AMD Secure Procesor; which is an important lyability, as it's propietary code that has full access to anything happening in cpu, cache, ram, storage and network.

Just because most people out there doesn't care about this security issue, it doesn't mean they are right. The amount of users supporting the propietary and proven malicious code in past ocassions (incluiding lenovo's superfish and LGs television android firmware), is what drives the sales, it doesn't mean they are right.