This is the 4th edition of the "Status of AMD platforms in coreboot". As usual the talk will cover the most recent news around the AMD support in open-source firmware ecosystem and updates of the topics covered in previous years. The current situation of coreboot project will be disclosed along with new deprecations and shifting more platforms out of the main tree.
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). Recent coreboot release enforced new requirements on the features supported by the silicon code base. More aging AMD platforms kept losing interest and many of them (including fully open ones) starting to cause unjustifiable overhead, because of accumulated technical debt. And yet again we experience similar situation as with the famous 4.11 branch becoming de facto stable branch for some more AMD platforms (open-source AGESA family14, family15tn, family16kb). Despite the efforts to keep the platforms in the tree by implementing the necessary changes, they landed onto the stable 4.18 branch.
Nowadays AMD is releasing the newest AGESA/FSP with the cooperation of hired coreboot developers. The support covers modern mobile Ryzen chips on Chromebook devices. We (3mdeb) trying to support the AMD platforms by reimplementing the ASUS KGPE-D16 (FSF RYF platform) support in coreboot. However, the situation is growing direr as the maintainership of PC Engines platforms by 3mdeb has ended. We would like to present Dasharo plan for long term stable and sustainable support for older platforms. If you are interested in open-source firmware for most open x86 platforms on the market feel free to tune in and discuss the ideas with us.
Speakers: Michał Żygowski