There's An Effort By A System76 Engineer To Bring Coreboot To Newer AMD Platforms

With System76 working towards offering more AMD Linux laptop options as well as continuing to expand their line-up of AMD desktop offerings, it appears their next hurdle is on bringing Coreboot to these current-generation AMD platforms.

System76 principal engineer Jeremy Soller who is also known for his work on the Rust-written Redox OS has initiated the effort on porting Coreboot to AMD Matisse and Renoir platforms.

I have seen the light of the great @LisaSu. Today begins my journey to port coreboot to Matisse and Renoir.

See you on the other side!

— Jeremy Soller (@jeremy_soller) July 24, 2020

He's just getting started but it will be interesting to see where this work leads.

Years ago AMD provided open-source AGESA releases and in fact embraced Coreboot rather well, but that all ended during the company's pre-Zen financial woes. They haven't yet returned to those Coreboot glory days but at least last year was told AMD is looking at Coreboot / open-source BIOS support again albeit nothing new to report on at this time. For this initial AMD Coreboot support for modern CPUs it would likely still be depending upon closed-source bits, similar to the Intel Coreboot support still pulling in binary blobs.

In any case, we are eager to see Coreboot support eventually come to these modern AMD platforms so stay tuned to Phoronix for reports on the progress.