It Will Be Interesting To See If AMD Supports Coreboot For Zen

[phoronix]

Phoronix: It Will Be Interesting To See If AMD Supports Coreboot For Zen

This year we should finally see the release of the highly anticipated AMD Zen processors that will hopefully better position their processors to compete with Intel. However, one of the unanswered questions about this next-gen platform is whether it will support Coreboot as an optional open-source firmware to replace the proprietary UEFI/BIOS...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMD-Zen-Will-It-Coreboot

[Brane215]

IIRC Agesa is just manufacturer's initialisation shortcut. It seems BKDG - BIOS and Kernel Developer Guide should contain most if not all of the needed information.

AFAIK Agesa just simplifies things for baord manufacturers, since it does its magic that works with different CPU/APU models etc.

[darkbasic]

If Zen will be decent enough and AMD will provide coreboot support my next APU will definitely be an AMD one.

[utack]

If Zen will be decent enough and AMD will provide coreboot support my next APU will definitely be an AMD one.

Same, I'd get a Mainboard with Zen and Coreboot instantly.

[Adarion]

> Sage Electronic Engineering, went out of business last year.

Noes!
Though I missed generally a lot of stuff last year due to workload. But this is outright sad.
I hope AMD will go on with Coreboot (Libreboot even?). Or find a similar enterprise with a similar experience. Cause Coreboot support is a good reason to buy something - I always make sure my stuff is at least compatible on a chip level (-> mainboards with soldered ECs/SuperIOs can be a culprit here).
UEFI is a failure and security / privacy issue by design. I am not saying the age old BIOS was awesome, but it did the job in 64K binaries, but now we have huge binaries full of unneccessary stuff like network stack (!) and spinning fan animations.
The firmware is to boot the box and hand over then to the bootloader / OS kernel; and maybe provide a minimal config interface for the user. Nothing more. And coreboot does exactly that.

[Brane215]

I like Coreboot for its modularity. You can mix and match various things, like backends etc. And you can check and fix/tweak things. No such thing in closed BIOS.
Even if HW supports some option, if BIOS support is flawed/nonexistent, you are screwed.

[Adarion]

if BIOS support is flawed/nonexistent, you are screwed.

Iirc. that was the ignition for Coreboot (aka LinuxBIOS at that time). I remember a story with somebody who had to run through ~4000 computers during boot of the cluster and plug in a keyboard in those headless machines, press F1, unplug, run to the next machine... since that BIOS threw a "keyboard error, press F1 to continue" message...

[mazumoto]

Same here ... I'd love to get Coreboot instead of UEFI on my machines - but recent intel stuff just doesn't work with it. If AMD really supports Coreboot with Zen and it's not that much worse performance-wise, I'd also consider switching over.

[timon37]

Ohhh damn... I didn't know they were planning that, but it would be soooo awesome.
I've been holding of a new PC for ~5 years now because it wasn't really worth it. Coreboot would be a very serious argument for Zen in my book.
Though maybe they're still working on it, just not in a public repository?

[pal666]

i don't understand what all these people are talking about
amd already supports coreboot on current processors, still no current motherboart supports it, so it can't be used at all
real problem with coreboot is not amd, it is motherboard vendors