A Dream Come True: Running Coreboot On A Modern, Retail Desktop Motherboard

Before flashing Dasharo/Coreboot onto this MSI Z690 Alder Lake motherboard you first should backup your BIOS, which can be done using the open-source Flashrom.

Whoops, accidentally had Secure Boot enabled from a proprietary BIOS update...

Flashing of the Dasharo firmware onto the MSI PRO Z690-A WiFi DDR4 was trouble-free and was able to carry it out very quickly.. At first there was some initial concern over an error, but that was addressed once reading the documentation further and realizing once upgrading the proprietary BIOS that UEFI Secure Boot had been reset to enabled. So if you are running Flashrom as root and surprised to see an access error, make sure you just reboot and disable Secure Boot first. After that, this Alder Lake retail motherboard was flashed and ready to go.

A successful BIOS dump.

Using Flashrom to flash the system BIOS was very easy to carry out on the Linux desktop and to do so quickly.

The hardware configuration matrix for Dasharo on this motherboard is rather limited at the moment with reports of the Core i5 12600K, Core i7 12700K, and Core i9 12900K as working. The reported memory matrix is similarly quite basic. For my purposes I started with just what I had laying around: an Intel Core i5 12400 and a PNY XLR8 Gaming 2x8GB DDR4-3600 kit. Both the RAM and CPU had ended up working fine on this Dasharo-flashed Intel system without issue.