Resizable BAR Support Being Prepared For Coreboot

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Resizable BAR Support Being Prepared For Coreboot

Thanks to Google engineers there is Resizable BAR "ReBAR" support being worked on for the open-source Coreboot...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Coreboot-Resizable-BAR

[binarybanana]

Great project. If only signed firmware updates weren't so common nowadays...
Even on the "open" PC platform almost everything is as locked down as on smartphones.
It's sad that this makes installing an auditable and secure firmware often impossible.

[discordian]

What's the point of that, faster graphics in the bios menu and with grub?

[Developer12]

What's the point of that, faster graphics in the bios menu and with grub?

More code churn because google would like to offload patches onto the mainline for a secret device they use internally.

[scottishduck]

What's the point of that, faster graphics in the bios menu and with grub?

ReBAR needs to be set by the BIOS before the OS can make use of it, this allows coreboot to do that.

[binarybanana]

What's the point of that, faster graphics in the bios menu and with grub?

No? More like 10+% more FPS in modern games. I think Micheal did a few benchmarks which showed undeniable improvents.

[Quackdoc]

Many benefits, many detriments, depends on the workload

[ezst036]

More code churn because google would like to offload patches onto the mainline for a secret device they use internally.

There is probably more truth to this than we all realize.

[mdedetrich]

Many benefits, many detriments, depends on the workload

Yup and also on this note its important to qualify what AMD's smart access memory is. Its not a synonym for resizable bar, rather its resizable bar + optimizations in their video card driver along with heuristics to determine which games actually get meaningful improvement when using resizable bar and which games dont or perform worse (which happens in a few rare cases).

Resizable bar is a PCI spec, it has nothing to do with AMD so its not like AMD has their own version of it.

[pgeorgi]

More code churn because google would like to offload patches onto the mainline for a secret device they use internally.

The linked follow-up patch points to google/brya (agah variant). https://chromeunboxed.com/12th-gen-i...s-development/ claims it's a Chromebook. "secret device they use internally", really?