AMD Ryzen/Zen Currently Doesn't Support Coreboot Today

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMD Ryzen/Zen Currently Doesn't Support Coreboot Today

Back in 2011 was the glorious announcement that AMD would support Coreboot with its future CPUs. Sadly, a lot has changed at AMD over the past half-decade, and there isn't any Coreboot support to find today for Zen/Ryzen...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMD-Ryzen-No-Coreboot-ATM

[TumultuousUnicorn]

BTW, the BKDG for AMD Family 17h is still not available. We need to wait for official documentation about Ryzen, it should help developers.

[maffblaster]

I haven't been in the game long enough to know AMD's history with Coreboot. Thanks for raising awareness. Hopefully AMD will become the predominant FOSS company of our time, both for CPUs and GPUs.

[funfunctor]

This will never happen, people like bridgman are fans of concepts like ATOMBIOS and PSP to firewall the opensource components from AMD and its partners so-called intellectual property. Unfortunately PSP and ME are essentially implementations of the same thing, a out-of-band big brother God.

Obviously engineers at AMD still don't get it and are helping build a turn-key totalitarian state, slow clap. Frankly it is sad, after decades of security conferences and mountains of voices from the community it still get though their skulls, they believe what they are implementing is the right compromise from a business decision that is the core of the problem.

[Markore]

One can also choose not to use proprietary technology in hardware, but have to take good care what hardware to buy and use.
Anyone knows faster and better equipped open source (GPL) CPU then UltraSPARC T2 (OpenBoot)?

[bitman]

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/5x5xl3/amd_to_consider_corebootlibreboot_support_contact/?st=iztkpm8y&sh=ede81356

In AMD’s AMA here, they say they will seriously consider releasing their Platform Security Processor (PSP) source code. This is their equivalent of the Intel Management Engine and would make AMD processors compatible with coreboot/libreboot.

[sarfarazahmad]

its a good opportunity for AMD though. with all the spying and everything going on. they can use that to leverage a better market share. That could strike a note with the public. open source, fast mainstream hardware. But I cannot gauge the otherside of this . How will opening up intellectually property hurt the company from a technical perspective ? (lead to copycats ?). For the very least open up the remote management engine, that will win AMD some more consumer confidence.

[Ardje]

its a good opportunity for AMD though. with all the spying and everything going on. they can use that to leverage a better market share. That could strike a note with the public. open source, fast mainstream hardware. But I cannot gauge the otherside of this . How will opening up intellectually property hurt the company from a technical perspective ? (lead to copycats ?). For the very least open up the remote management engine, that will win AMD some more consumer confidence.

The biggest problem with open technical development is that proprietary companies like nvidia can just use take the open part, improve a small part of it in a way that is actually obvious and only a small iteration in advancement, and patent that, and hence blocking all further development.
Kinda what happened to a lot of sound codecs.
So the biggest threat is not that other companies can use your work, no, they can abuse your work to block you from further development.
If you see what stupid patents nvidia used to drive the nails in 3dfx's coffin... There was not one that was innovative, and they all described existing techniques in a way as if they found the holy grail. Removing address decoder logic doesn't grant you a patent but it did grant nvidia one.
Or mineral oil immersion techniques. Kits were made by a company that experimented a lot with it. They got a cease and desist letter from another company referring to two patents they own, in which they cite the company that developed the original "technique".
So no, opening up "intellectual property" can give an anti-competitive competitor (like nvidia or qualcomm) the means to fsck you in the sunless regions.
Yes, I am an opensource believer and promoter, and where it helps I protest against unfair patent laws. Patent laws are usually embedded into trade treaties as treaties are usually considered above the local law.

[Adarion]

I actually made some account on reddit to ask the Coreboot / Libre* question but people were already faster.
Well, at least they'll present the idea internally and discuss it.

I think there is basically one problem and that is digital restriction management in the kind like "Netflix 4K" requires it. Content mafia pushes Netflix and Neflix pushed OS and hardware folks to support something really restrictive that prevents the user from accessing the memory of his/her/* own system. So you can't possibly copy any movie streams. For that you need implementations that go even below Kernel rights (ring <0) and that are transparent for the OS kernel. (don't ask me how exactly that works with triggering it and then receiving the data right from the NIC and so on). And now AMD can't easily compromise that because then

* no Netflix 4K on AMD machines - and people will be foolish and blame AMD for it
* problems with content industry if AMD would hamper / put out too much info on digital restriction management

I would still appreaciate a libre version - even if I can't watch Netflix 4K then (I gladly pass! :P). But even "just" Coreboot+blobs support would be nice, still some FW blobs, but at least no UEFI.

(Moreover I guess AMD does quite a lot of stuff and "magic sauce" with their core scheduling and thermal management in FW these days. But at least in that case probably few 3rd parties (with possible "IP") would be involved.)

[bridgman]

This will never happen, people like bridgman are fans of concepts like ATOMBIOS and PSP to firewall the opensource components from AMD and its partners so-called intellectual property.

Excuse me, but I think that deserves an apology from you not just a correction from me.

I have been one of the people speaking up internally for finding ways to offer "trustable" hardware; not necessarily open sourcing all of the PSP code (unless we could do it without putting other important parts of the business at risk) but maybe offering SKUs with disabled PSP or with minimal code that we *could* open.

You may be confusing "explaining why things are there and why <obvious solution X> isn't as practical as it might first seem" with "being a fan", but I know you are smart enough to understand that those are not necessarily the same thing.

I did see using AtomBIOS as a way to stretch a tiny open source development budget further and give us a better chance of catching up on the generations of hardware which did not have open source driver support back in 2007, but again that is not the same as "being a fan".