On Wed, Aug 5, 2015 at 11:05 AM, Karl Schmidt <karl@xtronics.com> wrote:

On 07/29/2015 01:54 PM, Patrick Georgi wrote:

One server board that is for sale and can be equipped with coreboot would be the ASUS KGPE-D16.

I looked at that - those are 5 years old now.. I would worry about the age of the capacitors.

I'm no longer seeing any MB - desktop or server that are from the last 2 years? And no one selling such systems?

Some are, yes, but they come and go and may require some searching. Probably your best bet for a desktop is to get a Chromebox since that comes pre-loaded with coreboot and the PCH and CPU are well-supported. Check out the coreboot on Chromebooks community on G+ for some pointers on custom-built ROMs.

For servers, I think there are some vendors who sell with coreboot pre-installed but only in volume. You might have better luck browsing the sources for a particular chipset you're interested in, buying one and replacing the vendor-provided firmware. The Asus KFSN4-DRE has been actively worked on recently and tested, as you can see from the Supported Motherboards test waterfall.

Also - I did some work with some UEFI BIOSs - I think there is an small OS running on top of everything? (not something the lends itself to creating secure systems... ).

There's nothing "small" about it, but yes, your general statement is accurate :-)

I had looked a few years ago and had the sense that there were rather current options - it appears that the climate has changed? Or am I missing part of the bigger picture?

That's also pretty accurate. The momentum of coreboot development was largely on servers a few years ago. Now it seems most (but not all) of the work is geared toward mobile and embedded systems, a natural consequence of many coreboot contributors shifting in that direction as well.

David Hendricks (dhendrix)
Systems Software Engineer, Google Inc.