[coreboot] Coreboot on the Supermicro H8SCM-F

[PeerCorps Trust Fund]

Is the Asus KCMA-D8 socket C32 motherboard eligible for FSF certification?

On 04/27/2017 07:30 AM, Patrick 'P. J.' McDermott wrote:
> On 2017-04-26 at 15:25, Rene Shuster wrote:
>> Maybe even FSF-endorsed. Great news! Spread the news.
>
> The H8SCM is a nice find, but unfortunately probably not eligible for
> FSF certification.
>
> The board has an old AGP-based Matrox G200eW GPU.  In addition to having
> a non-free VBIOS [1], the GPU has a "WARP Engine" – a RISC coprocessor
> core with non-free microcode (loaded by Linux [2]) to do triangle setup
> operations [3].
>
> So, a couple of blobs that would be rather non-trivial to reverse
> engineer and replace.  The board could surely run headless without them,
> but the FSF most likely wouldn't certify it since users could be tempted
> to load the blobs to get video output and graphics acceleration.
>
> [1]: https://www.coreboot.org/Board:supermicro/h8scm#Extract_VGA_BIOS
> [2]: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/drivers/gpu/drm/mga/mga_warp.c
> [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrox_G200
>