The MSI PRO B850-P WIFI motherboard is a unique AMD Ryzen AM5 motherboard for Linux/open-source enthusiasts that is competitively priced at just $179 USD. It’s interesting not because of the doings of MSI but rather 3mdeb with this being the desktop motherboard they are working on porting AMD openSIL and Coreboot to for allowing an open-source firmware stack.
Back in 2022 the 3mdeb consulting firm ported Coreboot to the MSI PRO Z690-A WIFI DDR4 motherboard as an Intel Alder Lake motherboard and the first modern desktop motherboard in years seeing a robust upstream Coreboot support. There hasn’t been any production desktop motherboards since then seeing such support but 3mdeb is in the process of porting Coreboot and their downstream Dasharo code to the MSI PRO B850-P WIFI, their first port to an AMD Ryzen platform and will be making use of AMD’s currently-experimental openSIL CPU silicon initialization code for a more open-source experience than the Alder Lake board that still relied on Intel’s closed-source FSP.
3mdeb is working on this Coreboot + openSIL port to the MSI PRO B850-P WIFI at the same time as they are also bringing a similar open-source firmware stack to the Gigabyte MZ33-AR1 EPYC 9005 server motherboard. For that AMD EPYC Turin motherboard they are also planning to bring OpenBMC to it too. Like with the Gigabyte EPYC motherboard port, 3mdeb is working on this MSI PRO B850-P WIFI without the support of MSI. Similar to the old Alder Lake motherboard port, for 3mdeb’s part they are aiming to offer the paid Dasharo builds for a nice consumer Coreboot-based firmware experience for those not wanting to build upstream Coreboot from source (once all the changes are upstreamed) and potentially selling the motherboard pre-flashed with Dasharo too for an easy deployment user experience. It would be great though if more motherboard vendors became involved in supporting 3mdeb to officially bring Coreboot-based firmware to their motherboards or at least funding them as an unofficial alternative.
3mdeb announced their MSI PRO B850-P WIFI Coreboot plans back in February and that they were able to receiving funding again from the NLnet Foundation to help in their effort. It’s important to keep in mind that the openSIL code used for it is from the AMD openSIL Phoenix snapshot that is considered “proof of concept” and not intended for prroduction use. While they are still working to get this openSIL+Coreboot port in good shape for the MSI PRO B850-P WIFI, I already bought a motherboard to prepare for testing.
