AMI Is Getting Involved With Open-Source Firmware Development

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMI Is Getting Involved With Open-Source Firmware Development

Well known BIOS provider AMI is getting in on the open-source system firmware game around OpenBMC and related projects...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMI-Open-System-Firmware

[ThoreauHD]

Very nice to see. Anything that keeps running hardware out of a landfill is welcome.

[ssokolow]

American Megatrends. Epic Megagames. The 80s and early 90s had fun company names.

[tildearrow]

American Megatrends. Epic Megagames. The 80s and early 90s had fun company names.

Agree, but Epic MegaGames turned into Epic Games.

But American Megatrends never turned into American Trends (probs they figured out they can't set the trends).

[oiaohm]

This is really them doing what they did in the past all over again. This seams like another grsecurity thing where they will develop extra security items and not push them upstream and will then get upset when someone starts implementing them upstream. Not sure if this will be long term helpful at all or just setting up a future annoyance.

[schmidtbag]

Depending how open they get, this could be a great way to work around artificial limitations of certain chipsets. AMI doesn't care because they're basically just providing the platform. Motherboard manufacturer's won't care because they likely don't profit much more from high-end chipsets; they just care about making sales. Intel and AMD no longer have competing chipsets on their respective platforms, and they're both pretty open-source friendly. So, should either of them get upset that people are unlocking features, well, maybe don't artificially cripple them.

American Megatrends. Epic Megagames. The 80s and early 90s had fun company names.

Don't forget Mega Man!

[Azrael5]

Any good news for end-users from AMI?

[oiaohm]

Any good news for end-users from AMI?

The way it currently written I would say no. AMI is going to want to maintain their closed source blobs I will bet.

[oiaohm]

Motherboard manufacturer's won't care because they likely don't profit much more from high-end chipsets; they just care about making sales.

This point here is important. Places like facebook and google do want to validate the firmware on motherboards particularly like for openBMC. This is why AMI will be trying to pull a grsecurity here. Short term they will get sales long term this path normally does not do open source project any good and end in a fight.

Yes its the same description as grsecurity we are going to make a hardened branch you are going to have to pay to have access to all features on. We know how this story always ends. grsecurity was not the first todo this. AMI will not be the last to do this either. The problem is it seams like a good profitable plan at first when its not.

The story always end badly with threats of legal actions to in fact legal actions.

If AMI was serous about long term what they wrote would have been written differently as in we will be working on upstream with our own fork for new features we have not up-streamed yet. But what is written in the slide is a pure cash grab move.

Please note places like facebook and google can mandate that the openBMC chip on the motherboard be a fpga that they can reprogram to be different CPU types. So just because you know the motherboard facebook and google bought you don't know what instruction set the BMC is in fact using this does make attacking these platforms a lot more tricky. Yes this area is more open source than a lot of people would suspect. AMI has been losing out in sales in this area for quite some time.

[ehansin]

Don't want to forget MEGA. Succinct and bold, Mega in all its simplistic glory!