Better Intel Skylake & Galileo Support Arrives For Coreboot

Coreboot received some new Intel feature work yesterday for improving the state of initializing some newer hardware with this open-source alternative to proprietary UEFI/BIOS.

First up is some Skylake love. Coreboot now has support for Intel Speed Shift Technology with Skylake processors. "Intel Speed Shift Technology is a new mechanism that replaces Legacy P-state. ISST allows OS hints about energy/performance preference. H/W performs the actual P-state control (autonomous)."

Related is Skylake support for Hardware P-State controls (HWP).

On the downside, there are still very few Skylake systems supported by Coreboot. The board support mostly comes down to the Google Chromebooks with Skylake CPUs/SoCs (Chell, Glados, Lars) and Intel's reference Kunimitsu platform.

On the front of Galileo / Quark support in Coreboot, the latest feature work there is enabling USB support.

Hopefully more interesting work from Intel will come to Coreboot in 2016. We're also still trying to track down what are AMD's plans for Coreboot moving forward.