AMD Reportedly Allows Disabling PSP Secure Processor With Latest AGESA

[davidbepo]

PSP was originally released by Sony in Japan in 2004. This cheap AMD ripoff came with Ryzen this year. It's so useless it can't even run PSP games though.

sir, you are a genius

[leipero]

To be precise, both BIOS and UEFI are types of firmware, UEFI has it in its name. To be honest, I see no logical difference between BIOS and UEFI, both are designed to do the same job. I would call UEFI one type of BIOS firmware

[starshipeleven]

If you want to nit pick, then "firm"ware needs to be burned into a read-only chip. So it's UEFI software and you're all wrong!

No, "firmware" definition does not require being written on a true ROM.
It just has to be a mostly-read-only type of software operating hardware at a low level to be called "firmware".

[mibo]

Please remember that a PC to be sold with a Windows 10 sticker needs to meet some requirements with UEFI/TPM/SecureBoot.
I guess AMD doesn't want to ignore the Windows market...

[starshipeleven]

It actually does make it more confusing, because some boards also ship legacy BIOS.

Nothing even remotely new is shipping BIOS firmware anymore. They at most ship a UEFI firmware disguised as BIOS. Or they have UEFI firmware set to boot in legacy mode, which is again not BIOS, just emulation of its APIs.

[starshipeleven]

What again is odd. Following that logic, car manufacturers should call the car's engine "horse" in order not to confuse customers...

The main difference here is that an engine and a horse are physical objects while board firmware is not.

Only very retarded people would seriously think a horse fits inside the car's engine compartment, while for most people BIOS and UEFi are the same thing (board firmware doing obscure things needed to start up the PC)

[shmerl]

many manufacturers keep calling board firmware BIOS for the sake of not confusing people.

It actually does make it more confusing, because some boards also ship legacy BIOS. I just call it motherboard firmware (or UEFI firmware if needed).

[soulsource]

Not odd, many manufacturers keep calling board firmware BIOS for the sake of not confusing people.

What again is odd. Following that logic, car manufacturers should call the car's engine "horse" in order not to confuse customers...

[starshipeleven]

I'd like to point out that such option is available (although not working) in UEFI firmware of my Lenovo 310 (AMD APU) from 2015, so this feature was planned since a long time ago.

Yep, this. We don't know what this option really does, and the description sounds more like it just "hides" the PSP from the OS.

If the driver for the PSP communication isn't loaded at UEFI level the PSP is isolated, not hidden.

Words have a different meaning, please learn to use the right words.

In the worst case it's actually making security worse by hiding the potential backdoor from the user.

Ah come on, that switch can either disable communication interfaces or not do a thing.

How can it "hide" something when the interfaces are standardized? They either are disabled or they are not.

[starshipeleven]

a) Trustzone is still there to be used from DRM vendors, we told AMD that we want a processor without it. Disabling it means nothing if some content distributors demand to enable it. Also newer Gpus have also secure processors.

This is a problem only if you wanted to support said content distributors and bought their content. Did you? I won't.