Hi all,
I think there is OpenRadeonBios. The problem is that thhe AtomBIOS bytecode is vendor specific blob, which cannot be in principle released by AMD because it is written by board manufacturers for specific wireup of graphical output. This is what I have learnt when I was interested in that way more.
Ron, if you create dummy atombios bios whithout an x86 code the radeon driver in kernel should be able to post it. It even works now. If you include the orginal rom in the cbfs but don't run it, the kernel driver is able to modeset it and "post" it. I think David Hubbard was interested in the replacement BIOS as well..
I think still that graphics modesetting is only minor problem. I feel very disturbed about AMD plans considering to go same way as Intel. I always liked AMD for opening their systems as much as possible. There was always my goal to have some x86 blob free at least for the x86 CPU code. This worked fine with VIA K8M890 where in VGA bios could be replaced by QEMU bios ;) Now we are drifting slowly away from any truly open x86 system.
I think we should put some effort making such x86 blobs runnable as kind of userspace process isolating it as much from coreboot as possible. I mean not only VGA BIOSes but also FSP or any other blobs.
The various other firmwares are next level problem, we should at least stick to the primary goal, to have free system which runs on main CPU.
Thanks Rudolf