Old AMD CPU & Motherboard Support Removed From Open-Source Coreboot

[michaelb1]

No one stepped up to even test code that would have brought those platforms up to date!

What particular Gerrit changes are you talking about? I have provided my test reports on all the changes I've been CC'd so far - https://review.coreboot.org/c/coreboot/+/64892 (CB:64892), CB:41958 , CB:36674, CB:37198 and many dozens of others, bricking my boards so many times in the process and having to unbrick them later. If my work is unnoticed, was all this just a huge waste of time?

[plantroon]

I think Coreboot's situation could be improved dramatically if they did 2 things.

1. Demistify the process of compiling Coreboot for a sepcific target, flashing and recovering from a bad flash. Most people who wanted to consider Coreboot were just scared they'd brick their system because they compiled something wrong.

2. Demistify getting into electronics. tl;dr electronics is a Nigerian scam and most people realize this after surviving 2-5 bulletpoints from the tldr, but, the few people who manage to submit to sunken cost phallacy do in fact obtain the necessary skills in the end. The parallels are clear, but if you don't see the writing on the wall, getting yourself involved in electronic development is a Nigerian scam because:
- people who are already in the know tell you to buy a soldering iron, but they never tell you what kind
- so you go to your normie mall because you want to get it now and not in a week by mail order, and get a soldering iron, but it's big and clunky and only good for welding railways or tractor parts
- when the capricious experts decide to tell you what kind of soldering iron you need, it turns out it's a long sold-out Kickstarter project like the pine64 soldering iron, so good luck overspending by prying the unobtainium soldering iron from someone else's hands
- next thing the self appointed chosenites and prodigies of electricity will tell you that altogether, what you needed to buy is not a soldering iron, but a desoldering station
- you buy the goddamn desoldering station and finally it's something that works
- turns out the desoldering station is not good enough for removing BIOS chips from a motherboard so the chosenites tell you that you need a hot air station, but never tell you which one
- after buying enough hot air stations and trying them out and knowing which ones are trash and waste of money and which ones aren't, you can try out different kinds of tin, flux and rosin
- after you have tested all the materials, you are now maybe ready to begin your adventure with soldering anything
- but wait! There's more! Now you need to learn how to use a BIOS chip programmer. Be sure it's the CH-231 and you have a relatively recent Debian lying around and your Google-fu skills are up to par, because nobody ever thought the CH-231 driver should be upstreamed into the Linux kernel
- by now you are 35 and you spent all your extra income up to this point that could have gone to buy you a house, but instead you have a bunch of rubbish nobody will take off your hands for free

This is the best thing I read this week

[pietrushnic]

I decided to spent some time here and reply to as many posts as possible, because current state and direction where open-source firmware heading is concerning to me as a founder and CEO of company which does embedded firmware development consultancy for a living. I also believe Phoronix Community deserve correct explanation of situation and at least references to the places where some community members expressed their concerns.

I tried to do something with my concerns but waste of energy was so big that I had to step back and invest more in space that can make difference according to vision that I share with 3mdeb Team. That's why we focusing a lot on Dasharo.

In this place I would like to be clear that any "stabilized" platform which would be no longer available on coreboot master is welcome in Dasharo fork. Of course that would require a lot of resources but I believe that part of Dasharo mission is to handle such situation.

I'm surprised to hear anyone was crazy enough to try Coreboot and live to tell the tale that it actually worked on anything. I was always tempted to try it, but there has been so little in ways of documentation and guides that I've forfeit the pursuit of Coreboot entirely. Coincidentally, that was in 2011 and since then I've only seen their wiki shrink and their website change and become less functional. I'm pretty sure by 2017 I considered it a dead project after not being able to find socket 939 era motherboard support summary on their wiki. Is it alive or is it just fashionably deprecating things in order to make the headlines?

rmoog I'm very sorry you are disappointed with the quality that coreboot provide, but this comment is unfair and in regard to "dead project" simply wrong. Please check release notes of recent versions:

• 4.18 - 1800 commits from over 200 different authors in 4 months
• 4.17 - 1300 new commits by around 150 authors in 4 months
• 4.16 - 1770 new commits by more than 170 authors in 4 months

There are many companies which invest in modern hardware support including our customers like Protectli or NovaCustom.

[pietrushnic]

A project that does not support modern hardware (chromebooks not counted) voluntarily shrinks its hardware list. That's an epic shot in the foot.

V1tol What about MSI Z690-A DDR4 and DDR5? Is that not modern enough?

[pietrushnic]

I don't think they have much choice if there is no one to maintain it.

Did anyone tried to check how much hardware is not maintained in Linux kernel? I can assure you there is plenty of dead code there that no one can run today. I didn't saw suggestions about removing that just based on the fact some people cannot use it. Of course even Linux kernel drop support for legacy stuff, but 386 was dropped after 27 years on market (21 years in kernel). There is plan to drop 486 after 23 years of market presence. coreboot "stabilize" platforms which are 7 years old. It is very important to ask question why. I tried to get answer, but didn't get any business reason. I will get to that when replying to other posts.

[Developer12]

V1tol What about MSI Z690-A DDR4 and DDR5? Is that not modern enough?

One to replace dozens? Hardly a replacement.

[pietrushnic]

rmoog I have would like to join others who liked below post since it say a lot of true about open-source firmware.

I think Coreboot's situation could be improved dramatically if they did 2 things.

1. Demistify the process of compiling Coreboot for a sepcific target, flashing and recovering from a bad flash. Most people who wanted to consider Coreboot were just scared they'd brick their system because they compiled something wrong.

Please let me know if Dasharo documentation fits your needs. If not please let me know what can be improved.

2. Demistify getting into electronics. tl;dr electronics is a Nigerian scam and most people realize this after surviving 2-5 bulletpoints from the tldr, but, the few people who manage to submit to sunken cost phallacy do in fact obtain the necessary skills in the end. The parallels are clear, but if you don't see the writing on the wall, getting yourself involved in electronic development is a Nigerian scam because:
- people who are already in the know tell you to buy a soldering iron, but they never tell you what kind
- so you go to your normie mall because you want to get it now and not in a week by mail order, and get a soldering iron, but it's big and clunky and only good for welding railways or tractor parts
- when the capricious experts decide to tell you what kind of soldering iron you need, it turns out it's a long sold-out Kickstarter project like the pine64 soldering iron, so good luck overspending by prying the unobtainium soldering iron from someone else's hands
- next thing the self appointed chosenites and prodigies of electricity will tell you that altogether, what you needed to buy is not a soldering iron, but a desoldering station
- you buy the goddamn desoldering station and finally it's something that works
- turns out the desoldering station is not good enough for removing BIOS chips from a motherboard so the chosenites tell you that you need a hot air station, but never tell you which one
- after buying enough hot air stations and trying them out and knowing which ones are trash and waste of money and which ones aren't, you can try out different kinds of tin, flux and rosin
- after you have tested all the materials, you are now maybe ready to begin your adventure with soldering anything
- but wait! There's more! Now you need to learn how to use a BIOS chip programmer. Be sure it's the CH-231 and you have a relatively recent Debian lying around and your Google-fu skills are up to par, because nobody ever thought the CH-231 driver should be upstreamed into the Linux kernel
- by now you are 35 and you spent all your extra income up to this point that could have gone to buy you a house, but instead you have a bunch of rubbish nobody will take off your hands for free

Open-source firmware needs way better documentation and marketing, but who should do that? Major corporations are in general interested in leveraging open-source firmware. Their marketing teams are not paid to yell about open-source firmware and its usefulness. Maybe employee branding teams are interested in use of open-source and free software rhetoric to hire developers.

On the other side can you point to open-source project which is role model in documentation and marketing? It would be interesting to understand how they managed to do that in what structure.

[pietrushnic]

It's a sad situation all around to be sure.

A colossal loss of support for a project already pretty stagnant in terms of new hardware, but as I understand it the code that AMD dumped on them to support all those platforms is pretty gnarly and never got fixed/replaced. Most of it is either heavily scrubbed garbage that was tossed over the wall, or is binary-only init but unlike the FSP isn't fixed up and maintained by AMD to meet new needs.

Nobody wants to work on it, so these various platforms running still reasonably modern, featureful chips have finally gotten the boot.

Developer12 this is not whole story. 3mdeb was willing to fix stuff and we tried as much as we could. There is whole patch train here. In case of PC Engines apu2+ we succeeded for some time, but there are some further "improvements" and "stabilization" that will lead to removal of more platforms. Question remain which vendors and which platforms will benefit from those changes? At the end of 2021 we discussed the problem during leadership calls (please check 1st Dec and 19th May here). Since that time criteria for platform removal were not clarified. Also please note who is pro and who is against the changes.

Finally to understand removal of PC Engines apu1 one have to understand that pushback was related to what you described above, but please note someone merged that code in the past, then people building products based on that with the margins that cannot justify rewrite of code that should be silicon vendor responsibility in the first place. As you can see despite of policy that maintenance of apu1 didn't required change of AGESA code we get continues suggestion in patch reviews that fixing broken code as a compliance to new requirements will not work. Rewriting was unbearable in such situation. People estimated in various places 100-250k USD investment needed to clean silicon vendor code.

Question is what will happen with platforms from Intel that coming and promising 15 years availability.

[pietrushnic]

One to replace dozens? Hardly a replacement.

Developer12 for now we have to be happy with what we get. Without continues improvements we will not get much more in current circumstances.

[pietrushnic]

Needing soldering/desoldering skills to recover from a bad flash is now largely a thing of the past provided you have a halfway decent motherboard. Just last week I recovered my board from a bad flash by using the onboard flash process that works even without a cpu/memory installed

partcyborg That technology right now is in most cases proprietary. Most likely controlled by MCU which use proprietary firmware. Unless someone will perform adversarial interoperability research on that technology we will not get support in open-source firmware for that. We also can count on some bigger OEM/ODM which will design thing in a open-source firmware friendly way.