AMD Plans to Transition from AGESA to Open Source OpenSIL Firmware by 2026 for Enhanced Security & Simplicity
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user1
Finally something other than ibm power systems
anticupidon
Back in the day, AMD promised to the EFF a blob free firmware.
Never materialized and that promise was never kept.
However, Intel platform has the Coreboot /Dasharo firmware. And for a long time. And Intel never promised anything, just allowed that to happen.
And why wait until 2026? Enough time to bake in backdoors?
Ket
I would think because it's an entire code re-write and not just frankinstein something together. Things like that take time and it's not very efficient to completely change a firmware codebase for an already existing platform. The way it looks like AMD intend to do it here means that in theory by the time the transition happens it should be thoroughly debugged from internal testing. Could definitely do without another AGESA situation where debugging is somewhat like swatting flies, for every one you get 5 more take it's place 😛
user1
I suspect it has more to do with de-blobbing, right now, amd uses trustzone, and i'm assuming that their PSP firmware is using 3rd party Intellectual properties, so they probably can't just opensource that part of the firmware.
Amd is always slow on the software front , mainly because of how small the company in comparison to intel, currently amd is at ~25k employees, but that is after acquisitions and recent hiring, prior(2021) it was closer to 15k, where as intel is sitting at ~130k employees, I wouldn't be surprised if a single software division is almost as big as the whole of amd.
Sylwester Zarębski
Intel platform is based on binary blob of Firmware Support Package (and other Intel binary blobs). It is on very opposite end than open source and the rest of Coreboot is more or less the same (or similar) for all platforms (and it has similar support for binary blobs from AMD).
Also, if AMD makes its internal firmware open source, it would replace current binary blobs, not entire BIOS/UEFI; it would be perfect for Coreboot project.
Read i.e: https://www.coreboot.org/Binary_situation
fantaskarsef
I hope they use the time to run this stuff through independent bug hunters and researchers for real, not just pretty words.
anticupidon
Thanks for the clarification!
mentor07825
AMD taking the Skyrim route of their software, let the community fix it?
anticupidon
Open source approach made that the web is what it is today.
What's not to like?
mentor07825
There's a few things but I would simply be pedantic. I wonder what the financial costings would be like if they went this route and, if money saved, would be passed to the consumer. If at all.
