Intel 4th Gen Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" Support Coming To Coreboot

Intel last week introduced the 4th Gen Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" processors and kicking off this week is an exciting new development: patches are pending for upstreaming Sapphire Rapids processor support into the open-source Coreboot!

A set of patches are now public and out for review today in upstreaming support for these new Intel Xeon Scalable processors into Coreboot. Additionally, the patch series gets Intel's "Archer City" dual socket Sapphire Rapids reference motherboard booting with Coreboot.

These Coreboot patches appear to originate from Quanta Computer, the OEM behind Intel's reference 2P board/platform for Sapphire Rapids. As seemingly there are some Phoronix readers not aware of Coreboot (formerly known long ago as LinuxBIOS), it's an open-source project serving as a system firmware implementation to replace proprietary BIOS/firmware on a wide range of platforms.

It's great seeing this Coreboot support come for the new Intel 4th Gen Xeon Scalable processors. Though as with Coreboot for other recent Intel platforms, it's still reliant on binary blobs such as around the Intel Firmware Support Package (FSP). In any event this is a great milestone today and sadly as of writing there is - sadly - no Coreboot support for AMD's EPYC 4th Gen / EPYC 9004 series "Genoa" processors.

Those interested in the Coreboot support for Sapphire Rapids can see the "spr-enable" patches now undergoing review before being merged to upstream Coreboot.