New Dasharo v1.1 Firmware For The MSI Z690 Board - DDR5 Variant Now Supported, ME Disable

[phoronix]

Phoronix: New Dasharo v1.1 Firmware For The MSI Z690 Board - DDR5 Variant Now Supported, ME Disable

One of the exciting open-source milestones this year was Dasharo/Coreboot being ported to a modern Intel Alder Lake Z690 motherboard that is readily available and at a decent price. That work by the open-source firmware engineers at 3mdeb was focused on the MSI PRO Z690-A WiFi DDR4 motherboard while with today's v1.1 release there is also support now for the MSI PRO Z690-A WiFi DDR5...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Dasharo-1.1-MSI-Z690-Board

[nazar-pc]

Any idea about XMP profile support, IOMMU grouping with this BIOS?

[uid313]

With this as a foundation, would it be easy to support previous 500-series and next 700-series of chipsets?
Would it be easy to implement support for Z690 motherboards from other vendors such as Asus and Gigabyte?
Would it be easy to add support for other MSI motherboards?

[lilos]

This board is perfect and ME disable is crazy ! Good job Dasharo !
I will like to see 13Gen support too !

[Viki Ai]

"ME disable", and my ears prick up!

[miczyg]

With this as a foundation, would it be easy to support previous 500-series and next 700-series of chipsets?
Would it be easy to implement support for Z690 motherboards from other vendors such as Asus and Gigabyte?
Would it be easy to add support for other MSI motherboards?

500 series chipsets? No, it is different microarchitecture (Rocket Lake-S presumably for which Intel FSP is not available).

700-series? Probably. We have our eyes set on it.

Z690 from other vendors? Definitely not easy, or at least it would require porting from scratch. AFAIK Gigabyte fuses chipsets with Boot Guard enabled, making open-source firmware integration impossible.

Other MSI Z690 boards? Yes, definitely easy (for most of them but maybe not all). The problem is always finding resources to buy hardware and fund the work to adapt existing code to work on more motherboards. On Dasharo documentation page you may find information how to support us if you find our work valuable.

[miczyg]

Any idea about XMP profile support, IOMMU grouping with this BIOS?

We haven't added a setup option to switch the memory SPD profile yet. Some people were brave enough to switch to XMP by customizing the code and compiling firmware for themselves and succeeded with XMP profile 1 for example.

Regarding IOMMU groups, this is the PCI device tree on one of the 3mdeb machines:

00:00.0 Host bridge [0600]: Intel Corporation Device [8086:4648] (rev 02)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation AlderLake-S GT1 [8086:4680] (rev 0c)
00:06.0 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation 12th Gen Core Processor PCI Express x4 Controller #0 [8086:464d] (rev 02)
00:14.0 USB controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation Device [8086:7ae0] (rev 11)
00:14.2 RAM memory [0500]: Intel Corporation Device [8086:7aa7] (rev 11)
00:14.3 Network controller [0280]: Intel Corporation Device [8086:7af0] (rev 11)
00:16.0 Communication controller [0780]: Intel Corporation Device [8086:7ae8] (rev 11)
00:17.0 SATA controller [0106]: Intel Corporation Device [8086:7ae2] (rev 11)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation Device [8086:7ab8] (rev 11)
00:1c.2 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation Device [8086:7aba] (rev 11)
00:1c.4 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation Device [8086:7abc] (rev 11)
00:1d.0 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation Device [8086:7ab0] (rev 11)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge [0601]: Intel Corporation Device [8086:7a84] (rev 11)
00:1f.3 Audio device [0403]: Intel Corporation Device [8086:7ad0] (rev 11)
00:1f.4 SMBus [0c05]: Intel Corporation Device [8086:7aa3] (rev 11)
00:1f.5 Serial bus controller [0c80]: Intel Corporation Device [8086:7aa4] (rev 11)
01:00.0 Non-Volatile memory controller [0108]: Intel Corporation Device [8086:f1aa] (rev 03)
02:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8192EE PCIe Wireless Network Adapter [10ec:818b]
03:00.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Intel Corporation Ethernet Controller I225-V [8086:15f3] (rev 03)
05:00.0 Non-Volatile memory controller [0108]: Samsung Electronics Co Ltd NVMe SSD Controller PM9A1/PM9A3/980PRO [144d:a80a]

And IOMMU groups from dmesg:

[ 0.214735] pci 0000:00:00.0: Adding to iommu group 0
[ 0.214741] pci 0000:00:02.0: Adding to iommu group 1
[ 0.214748] pci 0000:00:06.0: Adding to iommu group 2
[ 0.214755] pci 0000:00:14.0: Adding to iommu group 3
[ 0.214759] pci 0000:00:14.2: Adding to iommu group 3
[ 0.214766] pci 0000:00:14.3: Adding to iommu group 4
[ 0.214773] pci 0000:00:16.0: Adding to iommu group 5
[ 0.214777] pci 0000:00:17.0: Adding to iommu group 6
[ 0.214790] pci 0000:00:1c.0: Adding to iommu group 7
[ 0.214796] pci 0000:00:1c.2: Adding to iommu group 8
[ 0.214803] pci 0000:00:1c.4: Adding to iommu group 9
[ 0.214809] pci 0000:00:1d.0: Adding to iommu group 10
[ 0.214821] pci 0000:00:1f.0: Adding to iommu group 11
[ 0.214826] pci 0000:00:1f.3: Adding to iommu group 11
[ 0.214831] pci 0000:00:1f.4: Adding to iommu group 11
[ 0.214836] pci 0000:00:1f.5: Adding to iommu group 11
[ 0.214841] pci 0000:01:00.0: Adding to iommu group 12
[ 0.214854] pci 0000:02:00.0: Adding to iommu group 13
[ 0.214860] pci 0000:03:00.0: Adding to iommu group 14
[ 0.214867] pci 0000:05:00.0: Adding to iommu group 15

[moriel5]

Z690 from other vendors? Definitely not easy, or at least it would require porting from scratch. AFAIK Gigabyte fuses chipsets with Boot Guard enabled, making open-source firmware integration impossible.

Hmm... System76 uses Gigabyte motherboards in their Thelio lineup with their own Coreboot implementation, perhaps it would be possible to enlist their help with getting either their implementation or Dasharo (or another implementation) on standard Gigabyte motherboards of the same models?