Another ASRock Sandy Bridge / Ivy Bridge Motherboard Ported To Open-Source Coreboot

Another aging Intel motherboard is now supported by Coreboot for those wanting to free your system down to the BIOS.

The ASRock H77 Pro4-M is the latest board picked up by mainline Coreboot. Like with many of the consumer desktop motherboards supported by Coreboot, it's an old Sandy Bridge / Ivy Bridge era motherboard. The ASRock H77 Pro4-M is a micro-ATX motherboard that supports LGA-1155 Sandy/Ivy Bridge processors, four DDR3 slots, one PCI Express 3.0 x16 slot, Gigabit Ethernet, and other usual features for its age.

Unlike some of the motherboards supported by Coreboot that are still available from select Internet retailers refurbished/used, this doesn't appear to be the case for the H77 Pro4-M or having any robust availability from eBay or the like. But if you happen to have the ASRock H77 Pro4-M laying around or in any older system, it could be a fun holiday project flashing it with Coreboot. At least if it gets borked, there isn't any big investment loss.

The commit adding the ASRock H77 Pro4-M port notes most of the functionality is successfully working. Known not to be working though is booting from the two SATA ports provided by the ASM1061 controller rather than the PCH or PCIe-to-SATA bridge and the automatic fan control for the NCT67760 Super I/O is also known not to be working.

This is yet another aging motherboard now picked up by mainline Coreboot. Also added to Coreboot yesterday by Intel was a new reference platform for Alder Lake N. Sadly though when it comes to newer Intel platforms with Coreboot, it's mostly Intel reference motherboards not available to consumers or for Chromebooks.