Coreboot-Based Dasharo Firmware Updated For MSI Z690/Z790 Motherboards

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Coreboot-Based Dasharo Firnware Updated For MSI Z690/Z790 Motherboards

For those wanting to use an open-source Coreboot-based firmware on your desktop with modern hardware, a rare and leading option is 3mdeb's Coreboot-based "Dasharo" firmware on select MSI Z690/Z790 motherboards...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Dasharo-2024-Update-MSI

[andyprough]

It's not a desktop tower computer, but I do use a laptop with an Alder Lake i7 and 64gb ram using Dasharo coreboot at work. And System76 sells Raptor Lake laptops with Dasharo coreboot, and you can get up to an i7-13700H with 64GB of DDR5 ram, or an i7-1360P with 96GB of DDR5 ram. And Dasharo coreboot is supposed to be available on Meteor Lake laptop processors by this summer sometime.

So you do have more options than just these two MSI boards and some 12-year-old Opterons or 15-year-old Thinkpads. And the prices are reasonable. With recent Dasharo you can disable IME by flipping an option in the coreboot system setup, which is kind of nice. And the power management features seem fairly advanced.

[zir_blazer]

And System76 sells Raptor Lake laptops with Dasharo coreboot

System76 doesn't use Dasharo, they use coreboot maintained with their own Firmware developers.

[pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx]

The main thing I was wondering about Dasharo on these boards was, do all the basic features work? I'd include XMP and ReBAR in that list. So the answer was no, but now it's yes. Super cool. I hope they continue adding support for the newer MSI boards for Arrow Lake when they are released.

[andyprough]

System76 doesn't use Dasharo, they use coreboot maintained with their own Firmware developers.

Oh I see, you are right. I haven't gotten my hands on a System76 laptop to poke around at it. I've seen mentions of system76 tools in the Dasharo documents and on Dasharo's github, I assumed they were working together but probably they are just sharing tools and ideas.

[zir_blazer]

The main thing I was wondering about Dasharo on these boards was, do all the basic features work? I'd include XMP and ReBAR in that list. So the answer was no, but now it's yes. Super cool. I hope they continue adding support for the newer MSI boards for Arrow Lake when they are released.

ReBAR I can confirm that works. Including an Intel Arc.
XMP is an extreme hit or miss. Lack of options to fine tuning voltages/timmings means that if your XMP profiles doesn't work out of the box it is unusable, and it is prone to bricking and you rely on FlashBIOS to recover. It may have worked with the systems on the lab, but I would consider it experimental and avoid until more work is done on dealing with memory.

[pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx]

ReBAR I can confirm that works. Including an Intel Arc.
XMP is an extreme hit or miss. Lack of options to fine tuning voltages/timmings means that if your XMP profiles doesn't work out of the box it is unusable, and it is prone to bricking and you rely on FlashBIOS to recover. It may have worked with the systems on the lab, but I would consider it experimental and avoid until more work is done on dealing with memory.

Super helpful, thanks. There's the checkbox of feature availability, then there's how well it actually works.

[PublicNuisance]

Hopefully this update makes it's way to the non wifi version of the Z690-A. Just checked and 1.1.1 is still my latest option.

[cj.wijtmans]

coreboot still runs unkown binary blobs so whats the point.

[PublicNuisance]

coreboot still runs unkown binary blobs so whats the point.

Less binary blobs is better than more binary blobs. A system built around Dasharo is cheaper than a Talos II or a D16 system.