Another Micro-ATX Haswell Era Motherboard Working With Coreboot But Needs Tiny Blob

There are many Sandy Bridge era motherboards that have been freed by Coreboot while if you are looking for more options on something (slightly) newer, a micro-ATX Haswell-era motherboard from ASRock now works under this open-source BIOS implementation.

The ASRock H81M-HDS is the latest motherboard port now mainline in Coreboot. The ASRock H81M-HDS supports Haswell Core and Xeon CPUs, supports two DDR3/DDR3L DIMMs, one PCI Express x16 slot, onboard display outputs, four SATA ports, and multiple USB3/USB2 ports. This motherboard can be found refurbished still from some Internet shops for about $70 USD.

This board isn't 100% freed, however, by Coreboot. Hardware initialization still depends upon a 200KiB binary blob that contains Intel's memory reference code and system agent binary. The current Coreboot port also doesn't allow discrete GPUs to be used and there is no automatic fan control currently provided.

Those interested in this Haswell micro-ATX motherboard with Coreboot can find more details on this port via this Git merge.