The Current State Of Coreboot & Open-Source Firmware For AMD Hardware In 2023

[phoronix]

Phoronix: The Current State Of Coreboot & Open-Source Firmware For AMD Hardware In 2023

Michał Żygowski of firmware consulting firm 3mdeb presented at FOSDEM 2023 this weekend in Brussels. The focus of Żygowski's presentation for the Free Open-Source Developers' European Meeting was on the current client and server hardware state for AMD platforms with Coreboot / open-source firmware...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Open-Source-FW-2023

[grigi]

I was concerned a bit about coreboot on AMD. Right now it looks like Starlabs is the only viable route. Sad. I'm sure it would go faster if AMD was more involved, and at least released the blobs so other people can build the images.

[timofonic]

This needs to be improved ASAP...

[mb_q]

Starlabs Byte could be huge: https://pl.starlabs.systems/pages/byte -- not a laptop, quite modern, not terribly priced, and with CoreBoot in the works.

[hauberg]

Can anyone explain to me why coreboot is not more popular with CPU producers (Intel, AMD)? I understand that both developing a traditional bios and coreboot is too expensive but why not focus on coreboot exclusively? I'm sure there's an argument but I'd love to have it laid out so I could understand it.

[deusexmachina]

Can anyone explain to me why coreboot is not more popular with CPU producers (Intel, AMD)? I understand that both developing a traditional bios and coreboot is too expensive but why not focus on coreboot exclusively? I'm sure there's an argument but I'd love to have it laid out so I could understand it.

Debt to central banks and infiltrated by intelligence agencies. Intel Inside :P
An Zen 4 EPYC or Threadripper corebooted would be sweet to use for the next decade I bet!
Again, where's Project X in all of this, which was only reported on Phoronix?

[Developer12]

It would be great to get the support for the older platforms (fam15h, and maybe 14h. 16h was always binary-only) rewritten to better conform to the rest of coreboot, rather than the "messy" code AMD threw over the wall. But, if that hasn't happened in the last 10 years I don't know that there's anyone who would be willing to undertake that work, for any price.

Theoretically most of the information needed is there in the code AMD abandoned, but one would need to go through it bit by bit to understand what it's doing and reimplement it in a more ergonomic way.

[Developer12]

I won't know that google's project X actually died out, but rather was re-implemented to become the current "blobless" support. As far as I know however, it wasn't truly blobless and neither is the current implementation, as in reality it's instead relying on the Platform Security Processor to do all the initialization work and then being handed an almost fully initialized machine.

[Developer12]

Oxide's implementation doesn't contain any bits of coreboot and probably could never ever be upstreamed into coreboot, but it does work and it does boot their illumos kernel. It should be shipping in their products in a matter of months.

It's a rust boatloader that basically takes over from where the Platform Security Processor leaves off, finishes the rest of initialization, and then load and boots their kernel. It's far smaller and more minimal than coreboot, skipping everything it possibly can and offloading a lot of stuff to their custom illumos kernel. Afaik their modified kernel even handles SMM stuff.

[binarybanana]

Can anyone explain to me why coreboot is not more popular with CPU producers (Intel, AMD)? I understand that both developing a traditional bios and coreboot is too expensive but why not focus on coreboot exclusively? I'm sure there's an argument but I'd love to have it laid out so I could understand it.

It doesn't pass Microsoft's certifications and making it work requires more effort than using conventional options. It's a niche product. Most modern UEFI firmwares seem to be based on Intel's free reference implementation (also used on qemu, for example) and most vendors buy commercial downstream forks that they just customize as necessary.