AMD To Support Coreboot On All Future CPUs

[locovaca]

While great in general, I still doubt there will be support for consumer boards. Would love to be wrong on this.

@89c51

Much faster boot, as said above

Exactly. From my understanding the issues around making Coreboot more widespread is not CPU/Chipset support but the fact that each board manufacturer writes custom bios bins for their boards (well, contracted out) and a given chipset can be implemented in different ways between manufacturers. The expanse of customization among motherboard manufacturers made it difficult to support even a fraction of the current market of boards, let alone everything made in the last 5 years. And that's before you even get into laptops.

Rah rah AMD, but I don't expect this will substantially change anything in the future.

[crazycheese]

If they implement it, I will consider it instead of sandybridge xeon.
If they implement opensource drivers, I will consider their cards.
They promise - I promise.
No less, but no more.

[crazycheese]

Exactly. From my understanding the issues around making Coreboot more widespread is not CPU/Chipset support but the fact that each board manufacturer writes custom bios bins for their boards (well, contracted out) and a given chipset can be implemented in different ways between manufacturers. The expanse of customization among motherboard manufacturers made it difficult to support even a fraction of the current market of boards, let alone everything made in the last 5 years. And that's before you even get into laptops.

Rah rah AMD, but I don't expect this will substantially change anything in the future.

Exactly the reason why I can not cold boot my current Gigabyte GA-MA785GMT-UD2H v1.1 - I have to turn it off and on again. Else - segfaults and not booting CPU cores. I pinned it down to motherboard. ASUS motherboard with AM2+ but AM3 CPU on the contrary works fantastic.

Customisation is nice, as long as it is polished. Is better to have one GOOD tool, than a miriad of useless.

[droidhacker]

Exactly. From my understanding the issues around making Coreboot more widespread is not CPU/Chipset support but the fact that each board manufacturer writes custom bios bins for their boards (well, contracted out) and a given chipset can be implemented in different ways between manufacturers. The expanse of customization among motherboard manufacturers made it difficult to support even a fraction of the current market of boards, let alone everything made in the last 5 years. And that's before you even get into laptops.

Rah rah AMD, but I don't expect this will substantially change anything in the future.

The chipset is the chipset. The difference is the extra crap that gets "bolted on" to the chipset. Having the chipset supported by the manufacturer means that the community can focus more on the rest of the crap than in reverse engineering the chipset.

Most of the extra crap that gets bolted on is similar/same between manufacturers. They tend to use different sized bolts, so next after the extra crap gets figured out, its a relatively simple matter of adapting to the different bolt patterns.

At this point though, you start to get the advantage of having all or most of the extra crap being pulled into the chipset. At this point, you can pretty much just expect it to work, except for the few components that are added outside of the chipset. The mainboard manufacturers will eventually be forced to produce superior generic boards.

[monraaf]

Also have a Gigabyte board here. The bios is full of bugs (or lacks chipset specific bugfixes) that never got fixed. One of these bugs makes the thing unable to boot from usb. Unfortunately my board isn't listed as supported on the coreboot website otherwise I would have flashed it a long time ago.

[89c51]

@89c51

Much faster boot, as said above

anything funkier ????


i am not saying this is not important but i am not the kind of guy that turns its computer off or reboots

[Ex-Cyber]

anything funkier ????

One can build small apps (e.g. for diagnostics or backup/restore) or more featureful bootloaders into the firmware image without changing any of the core hardware setup code. The payload can basically be anything; it doesn't have to be Linux (which is why they changed the name from "LinuxBIOS"). It's a lot like building a custom kernel; most people never need to do it, but it's nice to have the option.

[locovaca]

The chipset is the chipset. The difference is the extra crap that gets "bolted on" to the chipset. Having the chipset supported by the manufacturer means that the community can focus more on the rest of the crap than in reverse engineering the chipset.

Oh really?

http://www.coreboot.org/Supported_Chipsets_and_Devices

http://www.coreboot.org/Supported_Motherboards

Sure looks like most major chipsets are already supported, yet the list of motherboards is a tiny fraction of boards using said chipsets.

For example, the 780/785 is a supported chipset. I only see two consumer boards even mentioned as partially supported.

There is far more than simply getting chipset support.

At this point though, you start to get the advantage of having all or most of the extra crap being pulled into the chipset. At this point, you can pretty much just expect it to work, except for the few components that are added outside of the chipset.

Except this isn't how it works. This isn't modprobing some device drivers into a kernel. Write something to a bad memory address due to a customization, motherboard doesn't boot, dead in the water. If you don't have a removable bios chip, your board is essentially trashed.

The mainboard manufacturers will eventually be forced to produce superior generic boards.

After you figure out how that is going to happen, go ahead and tackle global climate change, world food production shortages, middle east peace, and peak oil.

[V!NCENT]

"Support" is Coreboot jargon for "OK, PCI*16 doesn't work, but we can now run assembly code so who needs the GPU anyway?!" ;-)

[EmbraceUnity]

I had always used Intel chipsets in the past. They've converted me.

Definitely going with llano now for my next rig! Open source BIOS and graphics drivers! Now if only we could get OpenCL via Gallium3D.