The presentation is about AMD's involvement in coreboot evolution and development. Gives a high-level overview of the engagement of the silicon vendor in the coreboot project history. The presentation may contain a little bit of technical aspects of firmware and BIOS. However, the intended audience is not only firmware and BIOS developers, but also free and libre hardware enthusiasts too. If anybody is interested in the future of famous platforms like Asus KGPE-D16, Lenovo G505S, PC Engines apu1/apu2, please attend the presentation.
The history of AMD cooperation in coreboot projects reaches 2007 where the first contribution appeared for the Geode LX processors. AMD's open-source support continued for many years until now (with some break). This presentation will briefly introduce the history of AMD and coreboot, the evolution of the code, processors, creation of CIMX and AGESA and so on. It will also show the gradual change in the AMD attitude to open-source and introduction of binary platform initialization. Binary blobs, very disliked by the open-source community started to cause problems and raised the needs for workarounds to support basic processor features. Soon after that AMD stopped supporting the coreboot community. Moreover, recent coreboot releases started to enforce certain requirements on the features supported by the silicon code base. Aging platforms kept losing interest and many of them (including fully open ones) are being dropped from the main tree. Nowadays AMD released the newest AGESA with the cooperation of hired coreboot developers, but only for Google and their Chromebooks based on Ryzen processors. These are hard times for open firmware on AMD platforms. If you are curious about what is the present status of AMD boards and hardware (for example famous Asus KGPE-D16, Lenovo G505S, PC Engines apu1/apu2) in coreboot and what future awaits them, this presentation will give you a good overview.
Speakers: Michał Żygowski