AMD Preparing "openSIL" For Open-Source Silicon Initialization With Coreboot

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMD Preparing "openSIL" For Open-Source Silicon Initialization With Coreboot

If better open-source AMD Coreboot support was on your bingo card for years but long thought to be a lofty dream, get ready to celebrate... AMD dropped a juicy tid-bit of information to be announced next month with "openSIL" as it concerns open-source AMD x86 silicon initialization library, complete with AMD Coreboot support...

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

[andyprough]

It's good to see Michael get all excited like the rest of us to run a blobless AMD system, with Linux-libre kernel and his favorite Stallman-approved distro, like Trisquel or Guix. That will be a fun day of testing.

[Brane215]

Awesome. I hope it materializes quickly.
But ofcourse all depends on the fineprint iow "devil is in the details".

[stiiixy]

Did the Power10 'thing' with binaries get sorted?

[deusexmachina]

So where does this put the PSP? It still has transparent access to RAM and registers and is a black box - unless coreboot can disable or sandbox it? Doubleful.

[Michael]

Did the Power10 'thing' with binaries get sorted?

Not yet last I heard...

[Michael]

So where does this put the PSP? It still has transparent access to RAM and registers and is a black box - unless coreboot can disable or sandbox it? Doubleful.

Not yet clear with the limited information publicly available so far...

[phoron]

I guess they'll open some library code easing integration but the real control will stay in blobs. Else I 'll be delighted to be wrong. In the end for consumers DRM depends on the user not having control of the hardware, and for servers something similar happens with hardware features for rent and such shit. I doubt AMD will suddenly spring to RaptorCS level openness. But if they do, glory to them.

[RejectModernity]

"Here's your opensource bro, yeah about these blobs..."

[Developer12]

It's good to see Michael get all excited like the rest of us to run a blobless AMD system, with Linux-libre kernel and his favorite Stallman-approved distro, like Trisquel or Guix. That will be a fun day of testing.

Blobless? not even close. There will probably never be another blobless AMD system ever built.

All the AMD has done, and has been doing since the start of ZEN, is moved all of the sensitive firmware into the Platform Security Processor. It does the chipset init. It does the ram init. It inits most of the interfaces.

On a current AMD platform, when the x86 cores come out of reset, they are already running in 64-bit mode with RAM and basically everything else fully initalized. At this point the only thing left for coreboot to do is some minor chipset configuration and maybe PCIe init.