A Dream Come True: Running Coreboot On A Modern, Retail Desktop Motherboard

[phoronix]

Phoronix: A Dream Come True: Running Coreboot On A Modern, Retail Desktop Motherboard

Over the many years of covering Coreboot (going back to when it was called LinuxBIOS!) on Phoronix the selection of supported motherboards has been rather unfortunate especially over the last decade. If wanting to run Coreboot on a system today it basically means running a Google Chromebook, using an outdated server motherboard or old Lenovo ThinkPad that has seen a Coreboot port, or out of reach to most individuals are various server motherboards that are reference platforms or board designs from hyperscalers. But over the past several months the folks at the 3mdeb consulting firm have carried out a terrific feat: porting their "Dasharo" downstream of Coreboot to a modern and readily available Intel desktop motherboard. I've been trying this out and it has worked out surprisingly well. Here are my experiences and benchmarks of Coreboot/Dasharo on this Intel Alder Lake motherboard.

https://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=31256

[Guest]

I bought an ASUS KCMA-D8 motherboard a few years ago specifically for running Coreboot on it! It was an interesting experience; was my first time dealing with multi-socket and NUMA as well.

[Inopia]

i5-2400

Wow that's a classic!

Typo I guess

[Ironmask]

I'm not sure if I'd call an Intel motherboard a "dream", more like a specific type of dream, like the ones when you go to school naked or all your teeth fall out.

[rabcor]

So it gives you worse overall performance but not by that much, and outperforms the proprietary default in some cases. Good enough to be worth using in some cases.

[ferrellsl]

Serious question. So what's the use-case for this board after installing Coreboot? A ChromeOS dev system?

[intelfx]

Why is there any performance difference at all?

[JacekJagosz]

Why is there any performance difference at all?

Different clock behaviour. For last few generations your CPUs are not like in the old days, where when not idle they used to run at max base clock. Now you have turbo ratios, different for different number of cores used. Also, Intel specifies max boost duration for a CPU, but most motherboards keep boosting infinitely. And there are a few other small things most motherboards are doing that in theory is out of spec.
If this firmware is following the spec more closely , like the boost time is limited, that might explain the difference.

[intelfx]

Different clock behaviour. For last few generations your CPUs are not like in the old days, where when not idle they used to run at max base clock. Now you have turbo ratios, different for different number of cores used. Also, Intel specifies max boost duration for a CPU, but most motherboards keep boosting infinitely. And there are a few other small things most motherboards are doing that in theory is out of spec.
If this firmware is following the spec more closely , like the boost time is limited, that might explain the difference.

Yeah I know about clock management and turbo boost. You'd think all of it was managed by the closed-source blob.

[hax0r]

Anybody knows if these Coreboot ports to newer motherboards allow you to set/run X.M.P memory profile?