[coreboot] Dell R610 Support

Ed Hau tivrusky at cmail.nu
Thu Dec 13 03:59:32 CET 2018


Thanks for all the help so far after digging for the past day I was
thinking about picking up the KCMR-D12 as you had recommended and a set 
of
AMD OPTERON 4280 to go with it. This has the AST-2050 for the openBMC 
port
that I am also interested in. Just wanted one more round of sanity 
checks
before putting in the order.

Thank you for all the help.

On 2018-12-11 16:28, Taiidan at gmx.com wrote:

> On 12/11/2018 04:29 AM, Nico Huber wrote:
> > Hello Ed,
> >
> >> I just started looking into adding support for the dell r610.
> >
> > I really don't want to discourage you, but if I'm looking at the correct
> > datasheet, this machine is using Nehalem/Westmere EP processors (e.g.
> > Xeon X5550 etc.). If that is the case, this is no project suited for a
> > coreboot beginner: It's unlikely that Intel would give out any useful
> > documentation about these processors and there is no platform alike
> > (i.e. with QPI) in coreboot. Reverse engineering is possible, but as a
> > spare-time project this could take years.
> >
> > Maybe you can find another system that fits your workloads and already
> > has some coreboot chipset support. Though, on the Intel server front
> > it's not looking very good. Intel fought hard to keep these platforms
> > coreboot free.
> 
> Agreed - It is also an old platform without SLAT (hence no qubes) and 
> it
> has intels bad first gen IOMMU that doesn't have interrupt support.
> 
> IMO buy a KGPE-D16/KCMA-D8 if you want something to use as a daily
> driver that doesn't cost too much money or effort and is a good example
> of coreboot.
> 
> If you wish to port a board I would suggest to obtain another AMD 
> fam15h
> system of which I have some suggestions for - the easiest port is the
> KCMR-D12 which is the KCMA-D8's E-ATX bigger brother. Otherwise I would
> choose something still obtainable and well designed (ie: dual
> northbridge so more pci-e slots and lanes) such as the TYAN socket C32
> boards or the supermicro C32 LN4F/SAS boards which have onboard i350
> quad port nic and a LSI SAS 2008 controller preferably a board with an
> AST-2050 so that it could theoretically have OpenBMC ported to it.
> 
> x86 is a dead platform when it comes to freedom firmware though since
> AMD stopped releasing everything along with taking AGESA closed source
> and intel now only releases the fsp binary blob which performs all the
> hardware initiation making coreboot not much more than a wrapper layer
> for FSP.
> OpenPOWER (from RaptorCS) and RISC-V (from SiFive) are the future since
> open source firmware comes standard from the factory and they are the
> only owner controlled archs now.
> 
> --
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