THE IMPETUS Platform & Silicon Firmware Development has historically been a niche field in the compute industry, requiring specific, hard-to-find engineering skill sets. As time progressed, firmware capabilities expanded, offering a large range of enhanced capabilities and platform intelligen...
I think this means we will eventually see a fully open source Coreboot/Libreboot soon. Someone correct me if I am wrong please!
Oh wow, this is great news.
I expect there will still be uncomfortably many dubious black boxes left there. But it’s certainly a step in the right direction.
For me the sticking point with AMD was always shoddy SW/FW/drivers shipped with superior (compared to their biggest competitor anyway) hardware design. It’s good to see them conceding that and outsourcing to open source community rather than some dubious third party.
Though for the time being if you want truly open firmware get a POWER chip instead. If you can afford it.
Might as well risk and arm processors are in the news all the time as they get better. Apple m2 showed us that these other architectures could be better.
Sure, one of the two mentioned isn’t, but RISC-V is and that’s almost certainly going to be the ISA that finally displaces x86 if anything currently available can.
What exactly does this mean? Like, I’m familiar with open source software, but I’m not super familiar with the x86 bootloader stuff, so I’m not sure what benefits we get from this.
When you power on a computer, before any software (any operating system) has a chance to run, there’s “firmware” (kind of similar to software, except stored directly in the motherboard) that has to get things going (called “Platform Initialization”).
Generally the two jobs of the Platform Initialization firmware: (1) to detect (and maybe initialize) some hardware; and (2) to find the operating system and boot the operating system.
We have a standard interface for #2, which is called UEFI.
But for #1, it’s always been sort of a mysterious black box.
It necessarily has to be different for every chipset/every motherboard.
Manufacturers never really saw much reason to open source it.
The major community-driven open source project at doing #1 is called “coreboot”.
Due to the fact that it requires a new implementation for every chipset/motherboard and they are generally not documented (and may require some reverse-engineering of the hardware), coreboot has very very limited support.
So what AMD is open sourcing here is a collection of 3 C libraries which they will be using in all of their firmware, going forward.
These libraries are not chipset/motherboard-specific (you still need custom code for each motherboard) and do not implement UEFI (you would still need to implement UEFI/bootloader on top of it), but they’re helper functions that do a lot of what’s needed to implement firmware.
I just took a cursory look through the source code, but I saw a lot of code in there for detecting RAM DIMMs (how much RAM, what kind of RAM, etc.), which is useful code.
(Edit: I just read through the Wikipedia article on coreboot and it says “The most difficult hardware that coreboot initializes is the DRAM controllers and DRAM. In some cases, technical documentation on this subject is NDA restricted or unavailable.”. So if they can make use of AMD openSIL’s DRAM code, that could be a very big win!!)
The fact that AMD is going to use this in their own firmware, and also make it available for coreboot under an MIT licence, means that coreboot may* have a much easier time in the future supporting AMD motherboards.
I’m surprised that chipmakers waited this long. I have the feeling they all treat their firmware divisions as a necessary evil.
Has there ever been positive news associated with the lowest levels of firmware, or is it at best begrudging “AGESA 4.2.0.0 finally fixed the issue where the memory is clocked down to 250MHz when there are two runners on base” fix notices.
If they can toss the problem on a bunch of enthusiasts and people willing to finance open-source developers, they get it our of their hair and earn some public praise.
Realistically, it might be interesting for long-term platform support-- if someone wants to keep tweaking and optimizing a 10-year-old platform, they’ll have more tools at their disposal to do so.
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Oh wow, this is great news. I expect there will still be uncomfortably many dubious black boxes left there. But it’s certainly a step in the right direction. For me the sticking point with AMD was always shoddy SW/FW/drivers shipped with superior (compared to their biggest competitor anyway) hardware design. It’s good to see them conceding that and outsourcing to open source community rather than some dubious third party.
Though for the time being if you want truly open firmware get a POWER chip instead. If you can afford it.
Might as well risk and arm processors are in the news all the time as they get better. Apple m2 showed us that these other architectures could be better.
ARM isn’t open source, though
Sure, one of the two mentioned isn’t, but RISC-V is and that’s almost certainly going to be the ISA that finally displaces x86 if anything currently available can.
What exactly does this mean? Like, I’m familiar with open source software, but I’m not super familiar with the x86 bootloader stuff, so I’m not sure what benefits we get from this.
When you power on a computer, before any software (any operating system) has a chance to run, there’s “firmware” (kind of similar to software, except stored directly in the motherboard) that has to get things going (called “Platform Initialization”). Generally the two jobs of the Platform Initialization firmware: (1) to detect (and maybe initialize) some hardware; and (2) to find the operating system and boot the operating system.
We have a standard interface for #2, which is called UEFI. But for #1, it’s always been sort of a mysterious black box. It necessarily has to be different for every chipset/every motherboard. Manufacturers never really saw much reason to open source it. The major community-driven open source project at doing #1 is called “coreboot”. Due to the fact that it requires a new implementation for every chipset/motherboard and they are generally not documented (and may require some reverse-engineering of the hardware), coreboot has very very limited support.
So what AMD is open sourcing here is a collection of 3 C libraries which they will be using in all of their firmware, going forward. These libraries are not chipset/motherboard-specific (you still need custom code for each motherboard) and do not implement UEFI (you would still need to implement UEFI/bootloader on top of it), but they’re helper functions that do a lot of what’s needed to implement firmware. I just took a cursory look through the source code, but I saw a lot of code in there for detecting RAM DIMMs (how much RAM, what kind of RAM, etc.), which is useful code. (Edit: I just read through the Wikipedia article on coreboot and it says “The most difficult hardware that coreboot initializes is the DRAM controllers and DRAM. In some cases, technical documentation on this subject is NDA restricted or unavailable.”. So if they can make use of AMD openSIL’s DRAM code, that could be a very big win!!)
The fact that AMD is going to use this in their own firmware, and also make it available for coreboot under an MIT licence, means that coreboot may* have a much easier time in the future supporting AMD motherboards.
* we will see
I’m surprised that chipmakers waited this long. I have the feeling they all treat their firmware divisions as a necessary evil.
Has there ever been positive news associated with the lowest levels of firmware, or is it at best begrudging “AGESA 4.2.0.0 finally fixed the issue where the memory is clocked down to 250MHz when there are two runners on base” fix notices.
If they can toss the problem on a bunch of enthusiasts and people willing to finance open-source developers, they get it our of their hair and earn some public praise.
Realistically, it might be interesting for long-term platform support-- if someone wants to keep tweaking and optimizing a 10-year-old platform, they’ll have more tools at their disposal to do so.