i was aware of coreboot and opensil, but i figure they are not ready for something like this yet?
they would solve the hardest part. nowadays everything lives under pci express and a lot is orchestrated by the cpu/pch, which is the responsibility of… firmware to initialize. deciphering and reverse engineering this process would not be trivial at all.
i know some smaller controllers have firmware baked in, and some are on an outside flash chip that may or may not be able to be read and copied. some may have good documentation available and even reference implementations you might see repeated on different boards. some others might be easy to obtain. memory is about signal integrity, not firmware.
but yeah, i don’t think it would be easy (or possible at all) to have firmware be all open. i would bet there are clauses in some of their licensing officially forbidding us of all of this.
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Good news! On the firmware side there is some serius work being done to support it!
https://www.basicinputoutput.com/2025/01/amd-opensil.html?m=1 is AMDs work to opensource hardware intialzation
https://opensourcefirmware.foundation/projects/ Has a good list of mostly BIOS/UEFI replacements.
Idk about memory, Usb, sata or PCIe controllers though. (something else?)
i was aware of coreboot and opensil, but i figure they are not ready for something like this yet?
they would solve the hardest part. nowadays everything lives under pci express and a lot is orchestrated by the cpu/pch, which is the responsibility of… firmware to initialize. deciphering and reverse engineering this process would not be trivial at all.
i know some smaller controllers have firmware baked in, and some are on an outside flash chip that may or may not be able to be read and copied. some may have good documentation available and even reference implementations you might see repeated on different boards. some others might be easy to obtain. memory is about signal integrity, not firmware.
but yeah, i don’t think it would be easy (or possible at all) to have firmware be all open. i would bet there are clauses in some of their licensing officially forbidding us of all of this.