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.

With today's Dasharo v1.1 firmware update for the MSI PRO Z690-A WiFi DDR4, most notable is the DDR5 version of this motherboard being supported. That stems from user requests and interest in getting this largely open-source firmware (sans Intel blobs) working for the similar MSI motherboard with DDR5 support rather than DDR4.

The Dasharo v1.1 firmware update also now allows toggling the PS/2 controller, early boot DMA protection, an option to reset Secure Boot keys to the defaults, Intel ME disable support as another exciting feature sought by many, SATA disk password support, firmware performance reporting, network boot toggling, additional default settings for various Alder Lake S CPUs, and a wide variety of other fixes and improvements.

The lengthier change-log along with downloads for the new Dasharo 1.1 firmware binaries for the MSI PRO Z690-A WiFi DDR4/DDR5 motherboards is available from docs.dasharo.com.

In case you misses it from this summer, check out my review of Coreboot/Dasharo on this MSI Alder Lake motherboard.