Coreboot Support Taking Shape For Intel Icelake

Intel developers have been punctual in their bring-up of Icelake support within Coreboot.

Intel's open-source developers have already been busy for more than a year on bringing up bits of Icelake CPU and graphics support within the Linux ecosystem from new instructions for the GCC compiler, enabling the "Gen 11" graphics, adding the new device IDs, and other kernel and user-space for preparing for this exciting generation of Intel hardware.

The latest Intel Icelake open-source work to note is the bring-up is underway for Coreboot. At the end of October were the initial Icelake patches to Coreboot, which started out as mostly a copy of the Cannonlake code, but since then the new IDs are being added, new Icelake-specific header files for the FSP (Intel Firmware Support Package), adding the initial RVP (Reference Vehicle Platform) motherboard, and related work.

I spent some time this weekend going through the Icelake Coreboot patches though they don't reveal anything that wasn't already known in terms of next-gen details. The code is still being brought up so we'll see what else comes in the weeks/months ahead. Intel is particularly vested in Coreboot due to being a requirement around Google Chromebooks.

Icelake is the follow-on 10nm+ successor to Cannonlake and Whiskey/Amber/Coffee Lake hardware expected in 2019~2020. Icelake is expected to bring AVX-512 to desktop CPUs, more hardware mitigations to Spectre/Meltdown, significantly better onboard graphics, and other improvements.