[coreboot] Supported Motherboards

Nico Huber nico.h at gmx.de
Thu Nov 8 21:18:52 CET 2018


On 11/8/18 3:29 PM, Mike Banon wrote:
> Please consider AMD Lenovo G505S laptop: all the hardware
> virtualizations AMD-V / SLAT / IOMMU are fully supported there
> (although you have to install a microcode update to avoid the possible
> glitches), no Intel ME / AMD PSP, quad-core CPU, 16GB DDR3 RAM
> possible, recent build_status report,

Please avoid the G505s if possible. There might be neither ME nor PSP,
but that just means the controllers that are known and researched are
absent (it doesn't tell you anything about less researched ones). Also,
if you want to use its integrated graphics, you can't run fully free
software (not even on the main CPU) because AMD graphics driver develo-
pers force you to put a usually proprietary AtomBIOS into your firmware.
The Linux radeon/amdgpu drivers are only open source because they hide
the proprietary parts in the host firmware (BIOS/coreboot, not some
firmware that runs on the gfx processor).

> and there's a cosy community
> around it and we intend to support it for a looong time - as long as
> all our G505S last

That's good to hear. But here comes a warning: The G505s still uses
AGESA (a hard to maintain AMD reference code). This (and actually the
native coreboot AMD code too) might get moved away from our master
branch after any release. I believe it's only a question of time until
coreboot maintainers are finally fed up with it*.

A good solution would be to write native coreboot code for this platform
from scratch. Something at least of the quality of intel/x4x (and the
compatible southbridges) would be much appreciated and would likely
maintain itself for some years.

Nico

* The last time I worked on a bigger patch set in my spare time, I
  nearly gave up after some nights of work because of the unmain-
  tainable mess around {cpu,nb,sb}/amd/. It's dragging the whole
  project down, IMHO.



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