AMD Publishes New SB Register, Programming Docs

[rohcQaH]

But it really is important to have an open source BIOS, as it is possible for the BIOS vendors to include a secret hyper visor that in "best case" "only" monitors what you do.

If someone wanted to do something like that really bad, they'd just implement it in hardware. (Palladium relies on custom TPM chips anyway).

Your gfx card most likely already supports HDCP, a technology designed to restrict your actions. Is an open source BIOS going to help you against that? No.

You'd need "Open Source Hardware" for that. But while everyone can get a compiler, not everyone can get his own fab, so that's a pretty pointless discussion.

[hakl]

I would definitely get an AMD based motherboard if it meant a free BIOS. Found this on Google: http://www.coreboot.org/pipermail/co...er/039094.html

[Louise]

Heh, that's just plain paranoia talking.

You are probably right. Microsoft would never want to forbid Linux from running on PC's.

http://epic.org/privacy/consumer/microsoft/palladium.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Computing

[RoboJ1M]

Here it's mostly us old guys driving the open source support

Gandalf? 8D

Yay! I bought an SB750 board! With onboard Radeon 3300! OSS everyrthing!

J1M.

[mirv]

The most annoying thing about proprietary BIOSes in my opinion is that they are completely unpredictable in their use of SMIs (the so-called ring -2 that people get paranoid about). My old Sony laptop had random apparent hangs for as long as 10-20ms (fatal to the audio project I was trying to use it for). Downgrading its BIOS fixed the problem, which was caused by system management interrupts taking too long to give control back to the OS.

SMIs can be used for good, of course, like updating ACPI data, monitoring CPU temperature, and adjusting fan speed, but in a real operating system, I'd much rather do that using a low-priority preemptible thread than a realtime priority non-preemptible SMI.

I know this is really off-topic, but monitoring CPU temperature should always be possible, independent of the OS - don't want a crashing OS to stop temperature monitoring and other things like that.
Back on-topic, it's doubtful I'll ever get into using these docs directly, but it's great to see AMD pushing out this sort of thing for those who will be using it!

[unix_epoch]

The most annoying thing about proprietary BIOSes in my opinion is that they are completely unpredictable in their use of SMIs (the so-called ring -2 that people get paranoid about). My old Sony laptop had random apparent hangs for as long as 10-20ms (fatal to the audio project I was trying to use it for). Downgrading its BIOS fixed the problem, which was caused by system management interrupts taking too long to give control back to the OS.

SMIs can be used for good, of course, like updating ACPI data, monitoring CPU temperature, and adjusting fan speed, but in a real operating system, I'd much rather do that using a low-priority preemptible thread than a realtime priority non-preemptible SMI.

[Kano]

Working Coreboot on latest AMD boards would be very interesting for me - those docs will certainly help that. Intel docs seem to be very outdated, only very old chipsets are supported. As you can add custom payloads it should be really fun to use, hopefully the bios chip is on a socket

[deanjo]

But it really is important to have an open source BIOS, as it is possible for the BIOS vendors to include a secret hyper visor that in "best case" "only" monitors what you do.

In "worst" case, it can forbid you from doing some things.

Heh, that's just plain paranoia talking.

[Louise]

This is so cool!

CoreBoot really is an important project that many don't care much about. Apparently also Michael

But it really is important to have an open source BIOS, as it is possible for the BIOS vendors to include a secret hyper visor that in "best case" "only" monitors what you do.

In "worst" case, it can forbid you from doing some things.

So CoreBoot really is important, and anything that helps that is exceeding good news

Also with CoreBoot you would be able to encrypt your harddrive, and have CoreBoot ask for the passphrase.

[bridgman]

Here it's mostly us old guys driving the open source support