Open-Source Coreboot Port Working On A Retail Intel Alder Lake MSI Motherboard

[Developer12]

Well I gotta say Coreboot needs to work a lot on their site. I've tried to find out what mobos are supported, but it's just a generic mish-mash of random examples.

People port coreboot to whatever motherboard they have laying around, whenever they have time.

[Developer12]

System76 has talked about trying to do this with a modern computer for the past few years, so maybe they'll jump onboard and offer a desktop system with this board.

System76 makes their own motherboards and ships coreboot on many of their laptops. There's a good chance they'll expand the coreboot support to desktops with new models some time in the future.

[Developer12]

It would be nice to support more recent boards with coreboot, but the while intel have continued releasing FSF packages they haven't really gotten any more coreboot-friendly. Quite the opposite.

[danboid]

Fantastic news!

Does this enable bypassing / disabling the Management Engine? That's the main point of going to all this effort right?

[pietrushnic]

Dear Phoronix Community,
I'm Piotr Król CEO of 3mdeb. I just want to let you know that I would be glad to answer all questions and I'm definitely open to suggestions what we should include in the firmware to make it attractive for this expert community.

[pietrushnic]

Well I gotta say Coreboot needs to work a lot on their site. I've tried to find out what mobos are supported, but it's just a generic mish-mash of random examples.

anarki2 what are the most important features that coreboot missing, that you would include if you would have requried resources?

[pietrushnic]

Wow, that is huge - and would be a massive point towards intel if i was in the marked for a new system. Will be interesting how feature-complete that is in regards to the features of the mainboard and OC.

Termy we are very open for suggestions, we have technical knowledge and access to resources to provide as much OC features as community needs, if for one would be missing those can be added in the future. Pardon, my ignorance but what features are most important for OC community?
To answer question about feature-complete we just started porting we're barely booting Ubuntu for now and not all devices work as expected (e.g. no sound), but we will improve in following weeks and months. We also have limited testing capabilities in comparison to main hardware vendors, so support in testing would be appreciated.

Also, if Phoronix Community can suggest what would be the best way to gather suggestions we are also open. For now, it seems for use best to report feature requests to https://github.com/Dasharo/dasharo-issues/issues. Would that work?

[pietrushnic]

Would be pretty cool if this got to a level where hw vendors felt comfortable shipping it in products straight from the factory

Inopia that is the goal of Dasharo open-source firmware distribution. There is long road to go, but with Phoronix Community support we are pretty sure we can get there. Spreading the word and asking OEM/ODM and silicon vendors about Dasharo could be part of building pressure.

[pietrushnic]

MSI in my expierience mostly does pretty standard way, like generic tools for overclocking or modyfing stuff like CPU overclocking, GPU overclocking, throttlestop etc. work pretty well. I never also had to install modified drivers from MSI for something.

Never had compability issue installing linux on MSI laptops, and all those stuff like function keys were working despite that they never claim to support linux.

In general i am not suprised MSI board is supported by coreboot.

piotrj3 we were very careful in selecting that hardware and there are great hardware enthusiasts behind that decision. We would be glad to cooperate with MSI, but it looks like they consider BIOS part of their business model and other products are not interesting to them yet. Feel free read reddit post, which discuss in a lot of details reasoning behind selecting this hardware.

[Developer12]

Fantastic news!

Does this enable bypassing / disabling the Management Engine? That's the main point of going to all this effort right?

no. coreboot is unrelated to enabling/diabling the management engine

On recent platforms it cannot be completely disabled, and very recent ones have required that more functionality be left in place. see me_cleaner