AMD Commits Support To Coreboot For The Foreseeable Future

When you boot your computer, you probably see a splash screen from whatever motherboard manufacturer or system builder you purchased from. Under that splash screen your computer is busily preparing itself to accept your operating system of choice with a lot of proprietary code. coreboot, formerly LinuxBIOS, is an Free Software project first released over a decade ago designed to replace your aforementioned proprietary BIOS with their own lightweight code. They claim boot times to a Linux console of just 3 seconds. Thursday, AMD announced on their blog that they have committed to supporting coreboot for all future products starting with Llano APU. They claim that support will continue for the foreseeable future for both features and products.

AMD recently released coreboot for the AMD Opteron™ 4100 Series processors (the C32 socket) along with support for the SR5600 series of chipsets. In addition, AMD is working on completing the final piece of support for our AMD Opteron processor family and is planning on releasing coreboot support for the AMD Opteron 6100 Series (the G34 socket) in the not too distant future. AMD is also in the final process of releasing support for the AMD 785E/SB8xx (SB820M and SB850) chipsets. Once these are released, all current embedded processors and chipsets in production will have support in the coreboot community. Each of these releases will be targeted at the following platforms: SuperMicro MBD-H8SCM-F-O for the 4100/SR56x0/SP5100, SuperMicro H8QGI-G34 for the 6100/SR56x0/SP5100 and Advansus (Advantech) A785E- I (w/1.7GHz dual-core) for the AMD 785E/SB8xx.