Old AMD CPU & Motherboard Support Removed From Open-Source Coreboot

[rmoog]

All of this sounds way too specific...

Indeed it is, but judging by the amount of likes on my post, it seems a lot of people agree. Don't get me wrong, electronics is cool because it enables us to fix a lot of things previously deemed impossible. But the learning and spending curve is horrid, and when you deal with things like flashing BIOSes, you will definitely want to have those skills and equipment handy when you want to recover from a faulty operation. People who brought us let's say, homebrewing on PS3, had to get their hands dirty like this a lot of times and before E3 flashers and Cobras came along, people would try their hardest to build hardware flashers by themselves. I still have my Teensy++.

[partcyborg]

I think Coreboot's situation could be improved dramatically if they did 2 things.

1. Demistify the process of compiling Coreboot for a sepcific target, flashing and recovering from a bad flash. Most people who wanted to consider Coreboot were just scared they'd brick their system because they compiled something wrong.

2. Demistify getting into electronics. tl;dr electronics is a Nigerian scam and most people realize this after surviving 2-5 bulletpoints from the tldr, but, the few people who manage to submit to sunken cost phallacy do in fact obtain the necessary skills in the end. The parallels are clear, but if you don't see the writing on the wall, getting yourself involved in electronic development is a Nigerian scam because:
- people who are already in the know tell you to buy a soldering iron, but they never tell you what kind
- so you go to your normie mall because you want to get it now and not in a week by mail order, and get a soldering iron, but it's big and clunky and only good for welding railways or tractor parts
- when the capricious experts decide to tell you what kind of soldering iron you need, it turns out it's a long sold-out Kickstarter project like the pine64 soldering iron, so good luck overspending by prying the unobtainium soldering iron from someone else's hands
- next thing the self appointed chosenites and prodigies of electricity will tell you that altogether, what you needed to buy is not a soldering iron, but a desoldering station
- you buy the goddamn desoldering station and finally it's something that works
- turns out the desoldering station is not good enough for removing BIOS chips from a motherboard so the chosenites tell you that you need a hot air station, but never tell you which one
- after buying enough hot air stations and trying them out and knowing which ones are trash and waste of money and which ones aren't, you can try out different kinds of tin, flux and rosin
- after you have tested all the materials, you are now maybe ready to begin your adventure with soldering anything
- but wait! There's more! Now you need to learn how to use a BIOS chip programmer. Be sure it's the CH-231 and you have a relatively recent Debian lying around and your Google-fu skills are up to par, because nobody ever thought the CH-231 driver should be upstreamed into the Linux kernel
- by now you are 35 and you spent all your extra income up to this point that could have gone to buy you a house, but instead you have a bunch of rubbish nobody will take off your hands for free

Needing soldering/desoldering skills to recover from a bad flash is now largely a thing of the past provided you have a halfway decent motherboard. Just last week I recovered my board from a bad flash by using the onboard flash process that works even without a cpu/memory installed

[bug77]

Needing soldering/desoldering skills to recover from a bad flash is now largely a thing of the past provided you have a halfway decent motherboard. Just last week I recovered my board from a bad flash by using the onboard flash process that works even without a cpu/memory installed

But people have discovered they can also flash GPUs in the meantime

[michaelb1]

That's a little sad. I bought the Biostar AM1ML to try coreboot years ago but due to the lack of documentation, I've never had the patience to figure out by myself.

there IS coreboot documentation - just not on the coreboot website : because it has been made artificially difficult to contribute anything there, the people wrote their guides elsewhere! And they are scattered all over the Internet... Myself, I wrote a lot of manuals on DangerousPrototypes who was friendly enough to host them, and these manuals may be useful especially for coreboot-supported AMD boards like yours - see http://dangerousprototypes.com/docs/..._G505S_hacking (compatible not just with G505S !) if you are interested.

Speaking of coreboot website - lack of documentation has been (and is being) artificially caused by gatekeeping of their website's documentation section:

1) When it was "wiki-style" - it was impossible to just register an account like on the normal websites: you had to beg the admins for an account, and even after multiple times of begging (myself I am a coreboot dev with dozens of successful commits) I was unable to get one. They have introduced these restrictions to "combat spam bots" - but should have just done some good captcha! (maybe an in-house coreboot-themed one, if don't want to depend on the external services). So, it seems that the only people who had an access to this wiki, were mostly those who got lucky to register in the early days of this wiki (when there weren't any restrictions) or personally knew the admins - but I guess these people, as the seasoned devs, were busy writing code and never had enough time for the docs.

Then, many people have been complaining about the lack of documentation - which was a direct consequence of gatekeeping IMHO. However, instead of understanding the true cause, they though there is something wrong with the "wiki-style" online docs and replaced them with "markdown-style" as "more user-friendly for the devs".

2) When it became the "markdown-style": although now anyone could contribute the docs (finally!) , you just can't come and quickly edit it in the instant WYSIWYG mode - instead, you are doing it locally and then git commit your documentation which gets merged only after the senior devs approval, which slows down the process and is discouraging to be honest. They tell the extra approval is needed to gatekeep the harmful changes, but the likehood of anyone committing something harmful is too small, compared to the more significant harm caused by the lack of documentation.

So, currently the people are writing their coreboot documentation on the alternative websites. And personally I don't see much problem with it ( " Let a hundred flowers bloom; let a hundred schools of thought contend. " ), other than that these alternative websites are often less "eternal" than the coreboot's official place for docs

[michaelb1]

Needing soldering/desoldering skills to recover from a bad flash is now largely a thing of the past provided you have a halfway decent motherboard. Just last week I recovered my board from a bad flash by using the onboard flash process that works even without a cpu/memory installed

+ With the ISP flashing mode, which works for 90%+ boards with the soldered BIOS chips, you can flash a BIOS chip using a test clip and a $2 flashrom-supported programmer like CH341A (preferably a green PCB model, to avoid the 5V problematic ones) , so no soldering is required and the total cost of tools is less than $10 . In example, here's a "flashing a BIOS chip" article - http://dangerousprototypes.com/docs/...ith_Bus_Pirate . Although I wrote it with Bus Pirate (more expensive) programmer in mind, it's compatible with CH341A as well and the end of this article contains a CH341A diagram; also, it contains a review of 4 different SOIC8 test clip types

[michaelb1]

I don't think they have much choice if there is no one to maintain it.

Sorry, but this is wrong: I maintain 3 AMD boards from this list, test them regularly, and really sad to see their removal - for no good reason other than incompatibility with the new fancy code from Intel devs and other big corporations. (i.e. a new resource allocator)

Btw, all such compatibility problems could've been resolved by a few ifdefs here and there (if the new fancy code has to be there and you refuse to fix it for the old boards - then only use it for the new boards, instead of pushing it on everyone in a quest for free bugtesters), but they don't care...

[michaelb1]

Completely agree with bullshit documentation. I have an old compatible motherboard, but there's no instruction whatsoever.

I agree about the documentation (see my post above to see why the official docs are bad). However, the instructions don't really have to be too board-specific: since the flashing instructions are quite universal (there are the differences caused by the different BIOS chip types and teardown instructions, but there are tons of guides everywhere in the Internet); and the trickiest part IMHO is getting a good config - which could be often obtained from a board-status report of either someone else with your coreboot-supported board or from a similar coreboot board (similar by the chipset etc.). Tell me what's your board and I may try to help you

[avph]

Sorry, but this is wrong: I maintain 3 AMD boards from this list, test them regularly, and really sad to see their removal - for no good reason other than incompatibility with the new fancy code from Intel devs and other big corporations. (i.e. a new resource allocator)

Btw, all such compatibility problems could've been resolved by a few ifdefs here and there (if the new fancy code has to be there and you refuse to fix it for the old boards - then only use it for the new boards), but they don't care...

Resource allocator and CPU init codepaths are not written by Intel devs, nor are those even tailored to Intel hardware. The old codepaths mostly worked by accident with the problematic code supporting those old AMD platforms. Maintaining 2 codepaths for essentially doing the same thing is a mess to maintain. No it's not just a few ifdefs... It's thinking about how each change might impact 2 different codepaths instead of one, which involves knowing the details of both. In the Linux kernel that's not allowed for instance. Sidenote: no one stepped up to even test code that would have brought those platforms up to date!

[michaelb1]

I'm surprised to hear anyone was crazy enough to try Coreboot and live to tell the tale that it actually worked on anything. ... I'm pretty sure by 2017 I considered it a dead project after not being able to find socket 939 era motherboard support summary on their wiki

Well, it's quite rare that you find out a coreboot is compatible with the motherboard which you already own. Don't see any info about 939 socket? Then it's probably not supported, so just sell your used 939 board and get some coreboot-supported board successfully used by the people (i.e. available board-status reports, which contain the coreboot configs used to get this board running).

Btw, all of my 3 coreboot-supported AMD boards (which sadly have been dropped by this config) - G505S laptop, A88XM-E desktop and AM1I-A mini-desktop - I chose after looking what AMD "no-PSP-backdoor" boards are supported by the coreboot project (since "AMD no-PSP" is more recent & powerful than "Intel no-ME") , and had to buy them used

[rmoog]

Well, it's quite rare that you find out a coreboot is compatible with the motherboard which you already own. Don't see any info about 939 socket? Then it's probably not supported, so just sell your used 939 board and get some coreboot-supported board successfully used by the people (i.e. available board-status reports, which contain the coreboot configs used to get this board running).

Btw, all of my 3 coreboot-supported AMD boards (which sadly have been dropped by this config) - G505S laptop, A88XM-E desktop and AM1I-A mini-desktop - I chose after looking what AMD "no-PSP-backdoor" boards are supported by the coreboot project (since "AMD no-PSP" is more recent & powerful than "Intel no-ME") , and had to buy them used

Sorry, I'm not letting go of Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI because it's a rare specimen which was almost sold-out when I first purchased it in 2006, and I can't let go of Abit AX8 because that's my dad's desktop which is probably used to this very day. I'm more than inclined to let go of ECS Extreme Photon KV2, because that was a transitional board we used to onboard my dad on socket 939 while we still had AGP cards in the house. We couldn't find those fancy AGP&PCIE boards in stock for anything else than socket 754. We didn't want to transition him from one short-lived socket (Intel D865PERL, socket 478) to another. It was rightfully superseded by Abit AX8 when we got around to get him a PCIE GPU.

I firmly remember that Coreboot's wiki used to have this massive list of motherboards where you could find various 939 socket motherboards and there were plenty of useful comments there. Honestly I felt like a kid in a candy shop when I was merely reading all the summaries. It made me feel hopeful that others can find this information useful and contribute. That, was in 2011. And when I revisited the topic of Coreboot in what was 2011's future, I couldn't find that page again.

Also, I really appreciate that you've done anything positive for Coreboot.