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AMD Open Source

IS AMD Returning to Open-Source BIOS/Coreboot Support? (phoronix.com) 25

Posted by EditorDavid from the AMD-CPUs dept.
An anonymous reader quotes Phoronix: Back on the AMD EPYC 7002 "Rome" launch day I wrote about how AMD is working to return to open-source BIOS/Coreboot support and now there's further confirmation of their work in that direction. We were tipped off Friday that AMD's Head of Platform Firmware, Edward Benyukhis, publicly posted on LinkedIn that he is "looking to hire someone with solid Coreboot and UEFI background." If you have Coreboot experience or know someone who is, see LinkedIn for contacting Benyukhis.

That's exciting itself and certainly noteworthy, but also notable is AMD is now sponsoring next week's Open-Source Firmware Conference. AMD has joined the likes of Amazon AWS, Arm, System76, TrustedFirmware.org, and other companies in sponsoring this conference about Coreboot, LinuxBoot, and related open-source firmware projects.
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IS AMD Returning to Open-Source BIOS/Coreboot Support? More

IS AMD Returning to Open-Source BIOS/Coreboot Support?

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  • Can't we just get a System D boot? One data base to rule them all and absorb every feature into one program. What could be wrong with that?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Pretty sure that's what we have right now; heavy bloated BIOS/UEFIs/hardware subsystems with loads of strange configuration operations that benefit only administrators and power users that can be arsed to look into them.
      • Don't forget the TLAs who benefit from all that complexity by secretly finding and exploiting bugs there. They probably have back doors and self-destruct functions hidden in the proprietary microcode for most modern CPUs and even completely opening the source code likely won't prevent some as yet unidentified defects.

      • The drivers are trade secrets if not patented and copyrighted, one way chipset vendors use to prevent Chinese manufacturers from builk producing the chipsets and selling them to other vendors. It's been a real problem.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Your average 80s UNIX box with its boot prom was still better than UEFI today. At work we found out that if grub clobbered the boot config it was faster to reload an image than try and repair it. If you look at the grub.conf it even says not to edit by hand. Never had that problem with LILO. It was nice and simple and just worked.

    • Yes, you are a genius! X11 is just one program too! KDE is also just one program! What's that you say? Only an idiot would think that? Great point. KDE, X11, and init systems such as systemd aren't one program. You are not funny even if you knew that because slashdot is full of uninformed people who believe systemd is a program.

  • Is LibreBoot primary developer still on meds? (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 01, 2019 @07:44PM (#59147650)

    Has Leah Rowe finished her transition to female and settled down with the new medications? Because for a while there, she was poisoning the whole LibreBoot project with utterly unfounded transgender abuse accusations for *another* transgender programmer, one who was fired with cause from the Free Software Foundation.

    Could not make this stuff up, it was covered here at Slashdot as well.

    https://www.phoronix.com/scan.... [phoronix.com]

    • Libreboot is downstream of Coreboot and replaces the Intel ME.

      The AMD question should be: will they remove AMD Secure Technology/AMD PSP from processors that have Coreboot/open-sourced firmware?

      If not, then can a developer use documentation of their open-source firmware to remove (not just 'disable') AMD ST/PSP?

      • Libreboot is downstream of Coreboot and replaces the Intel ME.

        That post is 50% correct. Literally the first 5 words are right and the remaining 5 words are wrong.

        IME is literally the reason Libreboot is unsupported on Intel platforms.

        • Libreboot is unsupported on Intel platforms.

          Not sure if you've ever installed Libreboot with a Beaglebone, or own any Libreboot computers, but all of my Thinkpad x200 machines are Intel (core2duo) and have Libreboot installed by me. They also have no Intel ME anymore. The IME is on a seperate chip to the CPU and that chip is reflashed with the beaglebone, wiping the ME and replacing it with Libreboot.

          It's true that since Intel moved the ME out of a seperate chip onto the CPU this method cannot work anymore, and that no Intel machines from 2009 onw

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      This was all sorted out in 2017, no need to drag it back up and speculate on one of the contributor's mental health.

  • "Is" *not* "IS" (Score:3)

    by OzPeter ( 195038 ) on Sunday September 01, 2019 @08:04PM (#59147682)

    Sheez .. It's effin' basic editing. (Unless of course IS has now taken over AMD and that Coreboot is going to become a part of the caliphate)

    And the heading from TFA is (my emphasis)

    AMD Is Hiring For Coreboot Development, Sponsoring Open-Source Firmware Conference

    So it seems that AMD is returning to blah blah blah. No need to insert a question that no-one but AMD can answer.

  • Lets hope they are serious (Score:3)

    by jonwil ( 467024 ) on Sunday September 01, 2019 @08:15PM (#59147700)

    Lets hope they are serious about this and on consumer hardware as well as the big-iron server stuff.
    If Ryzen 5th gen (or whatever they are up to by then) desktop consumer CPUs and motherboards fully support Coreboot (no closed PSP blobs or the like) my next upgrade will be AMD.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by psm321 ( 450181 )
      That would certainly be a huge incentive

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by jonwil ( 467024 )

        There are an awful lot of geeks and others out there concerned about security and all the stuff going on in their PCs that they have no control over. Releasing a CPU and motherboard combo that doesn't have all this secret stuff like PSP and the hardware init BIOS code would make that CPU and motherboard combo the choice of those geeks and others (as well as those who want to build PCs catering to that market and want a way not to have all the hidden stuff getting in the way)

    • If Ryzen 5th gen (or whatever they are up to by then) desktop consumer CPUs and motherboards fully support Coreboot (no closed PSP blobs or the like) my next upgrade will be AMD.

      And if they don't your next upgrade will be what? That comment is 100% virtue signalling.

      • And if they don't your next upgrade will be what? That comment is 100% virtue signalling.

        They will probably continue to bend over for Intel. Lots of people have convinced themselves that the abuse is acceptable, and even desirable.

  • you know being slashdotted *before* you do anything, or are even chosen.... it's not like there's any pressure there

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