Coreboot 4.16 Released With New Motherboard Ports, AMD Sabrina SoC

Coreboot 4.16 is out this weekend as the newest quarterly release for this project striving for open-source system firmware / BIOS replacements.

As usual, much of the new release is focused on new motherboard ports and also as usual most of those new ports are around Google Chromebook motherboards. There are 22 new Google board ports with Coreboot 4.16, which may be for a mix of development boards and planned variants ultimately for retail Chromebook devices. Outside of the Google space, new motherboard ports in Coreboot 4.16 include the Acer Aspire VN7-572G, the AMD Chausie reference board, old Sandy Bridge era ASRock H77 Pro4-M and ASUS P8Z77-M products, the Intel Alder Lake N reference platform, the Star Labs StarBook Mk V, and the System76 Gaze16 laptop.

Sadly the range of supported Coreboot devices remain rather limited outside of Chromebooks, reference/development boards, and a few select Linux-focused laptops... Most of the consumer desktop boards supported remain rather old.

There is new processor code in this release for IBM POWER9 CPUs as well as having a QEMU POWER9 emulation motherboard target. The only other new processor target with Coreboot 4.16 is supporting AMD's Sabrina SoC.

Notable with Coreboot 4.16 is providing an option for disabling the Intel Converged Security Management Engine via the HECI interface for Intel Core CPUs from Skylake to Alder Lake. Coreboot 4.16 also adds coreboot-configurator as a simple GUI for changing CMOS settings, updating the U-Boot payload to U-Boot 2021.10, support for systems with more than 128 CPU cores, Intel FSP 2.3 support, support for PCI Express Resizable BAR (ReBAR), and many other changes.

More details on the Coreboot 4.16 release via Coreboot.org.