Open-source firmware consulting firm 3mdeb published a blog post today outlining their work on bringing their Coreboot-downstream Dasharo to the ASRock Rack SPC741D8/2L2T, a recent server motherboard for supporting Intel Xeon Sapphire Rapids and Emerald Rapids processors.
Thanks to work by student engineers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, upstream Coreboot already has a basic port to the ASRock Rack SPC741D8/2L2T. 3mdeb brought the code over to their Dasharo downstream fork while enabling a variety of features found in their downstream branch. Plus getting it to boot Microsoft Windows 11 and other features.
For those not wanting to flash the motherboard themselves, 3mdeb is selling a server built around the ASRock SPC741D8-2L2T/BCM that is already flashed with Dasharo and populated with CPU / RAM / etc for a pleasant out-of-the-box experience atop open-source firmware for this recent 4th / 5th Generation Intel Xeon platform. The ASRock Rack SPC741D8/2L2T motherboard is available in Internet retail channels for $750~870 USD.
All the details on their firmware porting adventure for this ASRock Rack server motherboard can be found via the 3mdeb.com blog.
If more interested in Coreboot/Dasharo for desktops, 3mdeb is the firm that brought open-source firmware to the MSI desktop Intel motherboard. They are also exploring AMD openSIL for Ryzen/EPYC platforms in the future.
