The Current State of AMD Zen Coreboot Support: Basically Limited To Chromebooks

Firmware developer Michał Żygowski of embedded consulting firm 3mdeb has provided a convenient overview over the current state of AMD Coreboot support for booting with this open-source alternative to conventional proprietary BIOS.

As most Phoronix readers should know, at the moment the Coreboot support for AMD platforms comes down to either several generations old hardware or if talking about Zen-era hardware is limited to Google Chromebooks. The only support AMD has been providing for Coreboot in recent times revolves around their APUs beginning to surface within Chromebooks and Google mandating Coreboot support, among their other engineering requirements.

This current Chromebook-focused support is far different from when nearly a decade ago they would offer open-source AGESA support and ended up allowing for decent Coreboot open-source support on various desktop and server motherboards. Michael characterized the current Coreboot Zen possibilities as, "family 17h support (Ryzen/Zen) is rather unlikely for other products thanChromebooks in coreboot."

His slide deck can be found here from FOSDEM 2020 along with the WebM/VP9 session recording from Brussels.

Not talked about was the possibility of AMD going back to open-source AGESA / Coreboot support as I mentioned AMD was exploring last August around the time of the EPYC "Rome" launch. I haven't, however, heard any update from AMD since then if that is still being pursued or its current state/plans. We certainly hope AMD having better Coreboot support is on their road-map for 2020 -- after all, AMD had been hiring Coreboot developers in late 2019 but it's not known yet if the focus was just for AMD Chromebooks or not.