Engineers Michał Żygowski and Piotr Król of open-source firmware consulting firm 3mdeb presented at FOSDEM in Brussels on open-source for confidential compute infrastructure. With Intel not making strides to fully open-up their FSP package, the talk was centered around the modern AMD open-source firmware efforts led by their openSIL initiative for open-source CPU silicon initialization to replace AGESA in the Zen 6 timeframe.
With extensively writing about AMD openSIL now for nearly three years, it shouldn’t be too much of a surprise for devoted Phoronix readers. While AMD openSIL isn’t production ready until the Zen 6 timeframe, there are the proof-of-concept implementations for Zen 4 and Zen 5 platforms right now.
3mdeb has been adapting the GIGABYTE MZ33-AR1 AMD EPYC 9005 “Turin” motherboard for their openSIL adaptation thus far. This retail motherboard can successfully boot with Coreboot and openSIL, rather than AMD targeting their own reference motherboard designs with openSIL development. 3mdeb is also working toward OpenBMC support too for this GIGABYTE MZ33-AR1 in making it quite an attractive option for EPYC 9005 use for those interested in open-source firmware today.
They aren’t working on just a minimum viable product for this open-source firmware effort but getting it through complete through booting SEV-SNP guests for secure encrypted virtualization with open-source firmware.
This year they hope to upstream the Coreboot support for the Gigabyte board in the first half of the year along with working on SEV-TIO support new to EPYC Turin. Plus OpenBMC bring-up for the board. Further plans are laid out for next year too.
Those wishing to learn more about these efforts by 3mdeb for advancing open-source AMD firmware for confidential compute infrastructure can learn more via the FOSDEM presentation page.
