Over the past few months the open-source firmware consulting firm 3mdeb has been porting Coreboot and AMD’s new openSIL silicon initialization library to the Gigabyte MZ33-AR1. The Gigabyte MZ33-AR1 is a broadly available motherboard that supports the latest-generation AMD EPYC 9005 “Turin” server processors. 3mdeb has been fairly successful in their quest and an early demonstrator for openSIL.
3mdeb was funded by the NLnet Foundation with a grant to work on bringing open-source firmware to modern AMD motherboards. Michał Żygowski and other 3mdeb engineers have been working in turn on getting AMD openSIL and Coreboot running on the Gigabyte MZ33-AR1 as their preferred target. This follows 3mdeb previously porting Coreboot to a generally available Intel desktop motherboard.
In a blog post today they covered their latest AMD Turin porting work for Coreboot as they approach the end of the NLNet-funded effort. Recently they have been squaring away the ACPI support as well as addressing various bug fixes for being able to run both Microsoft Windows and Linux on this Gigabyte server motherboard.
They concluded today’s blog post on this porting effort with:
“Throughout the whole process of porting a new microarchitecture, a lot of bugfixes and changes had to be made to coreboot to support a modern server properly. It would not be possible without AMD’s OpenSIL initiative. And also the NLnet Foundation, of course, for sponsoring the project. Huge kudos to them.”
Those wanting to learn more about this Coreboot+openSIL port to the Gigabyte MZ33-AR1 can do so via the 3mdeb blog. More technical details on the port for this motherboard can also be found via the Dasharo documentation.
With openSIL aiming for production readiness with next-gen AMD Zen 6 client and server platforms, hopefully this is just the beginning of seeing a lot more Coreboot ports to modern AMD platforms.
