Coreboot 4.15 Released With New System76 Laptops, More ASUS Motherboards

[pgeorgi]

This is of course possible in general, but it is not the focus of the coreboot community. Better power management, faster boot, "lightweightness", fixing bios bugs (which there are plenty), and disabling IME and AMD's equivalent are the thing coreboot people emphasize.
Sometimes bios at certain version drops support for some hardware - this can be in principle remedied, better support for virtualization (like IOMMUs) etc.

There's no "official set of things" coreboot people emphasize, but that list you gave covers what the current crowd of coreboot contributors tends to be interested in the most (not all people in the same things. It's quite a diverse crowd.)

If vw_fan17 is willing to dig into overclocking and add support for that, they could extend that list with "overclocking support" by contributing. OTOH, I'm not sure what's involved with overclocking - it might be a costly hobby, quite literally burning through components until things work fine.

[pgeorgi]

Incidentally, I sent an email yesterday asking what happened to some of the previous work I dug up. I don't have much hope of being able to undertake it (I know jack squat about DDR4 PHYs, even after my time verifying them) but the first step is to know what you're working with.

The commit really ended up that repo by accident, it's a mirror of a few other repos and shouldn't have been public - so while that's my site, I'm not sure about that work in particular because it isn't mine.

That said, the commit in question was an older version where some functional aspects haven't even been investigated, and from what I've heard the developer working on it kinda lost track of that effort due to other things (coreboot or otherwise) that moved to the top of the agenda.

[pal666]

more prehistoric asus motherboards

[pgeorgi]

more prehistoric asus motherboards

Contemporary hardware support is available for System76, Purism, StarLabs, Chrome OS devices, ... - all of which are maintained by the respective vendor (or in the case of Chrome OS, Google).

The Asus mainboard implementations aren't made by Asus, so support for these boards covers whatever hobbyists feel like doing. If you want contemporary Asus support, it's you who needs to make it happen.

[pal666]

The Asus mainboard implementations aren't made by Asus, so support for these boards covers whatever hobbyists feel like doing. If you want contemporary Asus support, it's you who needs to make it happen.

i know, but i'd prefer vendor support

[Developer12]

The commit really ended up that repo by accident, it's a mirror of a few other repos and shouldn't have been public - so while that's my site, I'm not sure about that work in particular because it isn't mine.

That said, the commit in question was an older version where some functional aspects haven't even been investigated, and from what I've heard the developer working on it kinda lost track of that effort due to other things (coreboot or otherwise) that moved to the top of the agenda.

Do you know who to ask about it now?

[lacek]

If vw_fan17 is willing to dig into overclocking and add support for that, they could extend that list with "overclocking support" by contributing. OTOH, I'm not sure what's involved with overclocking - it might be a costly hobby, quite literally burning through components until things work fine.

Think with overclocking is of course that it is ultimately useless. It is great as a hobby, but the benefit is few % (or say 30% with liquid nitrogen) of speed, at the price of much larger power consumption, questionable stability, warranty loss. If there is a serious problem with efficiency the solution is to buy a faster computer, add nodes to the cluster, consider faster storage, faster networking or do some optimization in terms of software (use better code). The target for the overclocking are some and the people would like to transform their $200 CPU into $240 CPU, for free (that includes lots of 15yo's...). The added value is too small to justify any serious investment on the firmware level.


In certain applications one underclocking is actually more desirable: saving say 50% power consumption at 20% efficiency reduction is not a bad deal, and this is easy to transform into $$$s.

As for overclocking: Intel should present their new CPUs at some global warming summit

That was, me, Mr. Obvious.

[lacek]

If you want contemporary Asus support, it's you who needs to make it happen.

Sure, but most folks using Linux and associated software are users. For them a better option would be to crowdfund some development effort.

IF vendor support is not a thing, then at the very least vendor-supplied documentation would be a nice touch.

[Developer12]

Sure, but most folks using Linux and associated software are users. For them a better option would be to crowdfund some development effort.

It continues to astound me that coreboot doesn't have mechanisms in place to provide monetary support to developers, despite repeated complaints about lacking support and manpower. There are lots of people willing to step up and pay for continued maintenance of their favorite platform, but in the end it always falls to some developer's charity.

[lacek]

It continues to astound me that coreboot doesn't have mechanisms in place to provide monetary support to developers, despite repeated complaints about lacking support and manpower. There are lots of people willing to step up and pay for continued maintenance of their favorite platform, but in the end it always falls to some developer's charity.

Are they large enough to be able to handle that? The coreboot.org seems to be a site registrated to a single person. Accepting donations from all over the world must be a tax-nightmare. What could be a solution is some collaboration with e.g. IFF/ FSF that would accept donations on behalf of the projects, handle formalities for a cut out of donations and give "legally washed" money to the project.

At the very least doing it in person it would be a nightmare in my EU country (it can be even a nightmare to accept gift money on one's wedding party) as soon as you get audited.