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

[phoronix]

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

Upstream Coreboot has phased out support for older AMD 14h / 15h / 16h series processors and associated motherboards...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Coreboot-Drops-Old-AMD-Hardware

[rmoog]

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 was always tempted to try it, but there has been so little in ways of documentation and guides that I've forfeit the pursuit of Coreboot entirely. Coincidentally, that was in 2011 and since then I've only seen their wiki shrink and their website change and become less functional. 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. Is it alive or is it just fashionably deprecating things in order to make the headlines?

[V1tol]

A project that does not support modern hardware (chromebooks not counted) voluntarily shrinks its hardware list. That's an epic shot in the foot.

[anarsoul]

A project that does not support modern hardware (chromebooks not counted) voluntarily shrinks its hardware list. That's an epic shot in the foot.

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

[R41N3R]

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.

[rmoog]

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

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

[RejectModernity]

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

[elmerovingio]

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

All of this sounds way too specific...

[Brook-trout]

I was an integrator at Linux Networx. We used Linux Bios on super Micro dual CPU Motherboards. The utility used to get it into the bios was the bios-flash itility. It did help to make a large Cluster boot up faster. But was most notable on disk less clusters. Where the OS was loaded into each nodes memory over the network. The nodes host name, network address were the same on each node. Populated by way of the MAC address of each individual node.

I would have to play with coreboot on modern Linux distributions and hardware. One had to ensure that each node had the exact same hardware, firmware and updates. For this to work. It also ment that all modules be built into the kernel as well. Which ment any module tuning was done in just one place. Not on each individual node in the cluster. It was a fun fast paced job with great rewards.

I feel coreboot has the potential to be as useful as linux bios.

[Developer12]

It's a sad situation all around to be sure.

A colossal loss of support for a project already pretty stagnant in terms of new hardware, but as I understand it the code that AMD dumped on them to support all those platforms is pretty gnarly and never got fixed/replaced. Most of it is either heavily scrubbed garbage that was tossed over the wall, or is binary-only init but unlike the FSP isn't fixed up and maintained by AMD to meet new needs.

Nobody wants to work on it, so these various platforms running still reasonably modern, featureful chips have finally gotten the boot.