Google & Intel Making Progress For More Firmware Flexibility Around FSP Blobs

For modern Intel platforms supporting Coreboot whether it be for Chromebooks or on server platforms, they are still beholden to the Intel Firmware Support Package (FSP) binary blobs. But Google and Intel engineers have been working to enable more flexibility around the FSP binaries by being able to optionally reduce the amount of proprietary firmware executed on the CPU, optionally weeding out some of the optional FSP components, and optimizing the status quo to achieve greater boot speeds.

Subrata Banik of Google in collaboration with Vincent Zimmer of Intel have laid out "a path forward" to enhance the firmware / boot experience around the Intel Firmware Support Package and the ability to "create your own" FSP binary.

While still relying on closed-source silicon reference blobs, they have been working on the ability to eliminate optional bits, reduce the amount of proprietary firmware that runs off the host processor, and driver greater flexibility into the open-source firmware.

OSFW Foundation Intel FSP firmware graphic

The goal ultimately comes down to:

"Our goal is to be able to customize the silicon reference code although we might not be able to customize the actual underlying silicon as per the target product."

More details on this quest via the Open Source Firmware Foundation blog. Anything to reduce the amount of binary blobs in the firmware is a win in our book while ideally it still would be great if Intel made more progress on being able to publicly open-source more elements of the Firmware Support Package.