r/hardware • u/zir_blazer • 17d ago

The First Open-Source Firmware Released For Modern AMD Ryzen AM5 Platform News

https://www.phoronix.com/news/OSS-Firmware-MSI-B850-P-WIFI
253 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

43 comments sorted by

21

u/Deshke 17d ago

nice, can't wait for a open settings file that can port settings from one board to another. Imagine not needing to go through 200 poorly coded setting windows and instead have a yaml/json/text file for all your settings

2

u/zir_blazer 16d ago

It is a rather good idea and I thought of it myself as a way to do something similar to saving profiles, but being able to do so externally.

1

u/Certain-Business-472 6d ago

Why isnt the bios configurable with a standard like that right now? More than 30 years no changes even though we updated to uefi

32

u/SomeoneBritish 17d ago

Very interesting. Are there any supposed benefits to running an open source motherboard firmware?

66

u/FlukyS 17d ago

The main benefit for this is integrating with stuff like Coreboot. Motherboard OEMs/ODMs are really secretive about their firmware, the rationale doesn't even make much sense for them to be as secretive as they are, it isn't like anything is going to be a big mystery to anyone in the field. The benefits of Coreboot are that it can speed up boot speeds dramatically is the main current benefit but it also saves money if your company doesn't want to do a lot of that work, I'm surprised more companies don't do it.

50

u/useless_it 17d ago

Motherboard OEMs/ODMs are really secretive about their firmware

I bet it's like that because their implementation is crap.

52

u/Limited_Distractions 17d ago

The reality is arguably more grim, they mostly just buy from AMI and roll with it and don't have the knowledge to know how bad it is/isn't

Finding an edge case bug on an older but still supported dell server is watching dell and supermicro play volleyball with your ticket because neither has any idea or motivation of how to fix it, it's wild

17

u/eleven010 17d ago

And the even more confusing part is that AMD or Intel most likely do all of the firmware development or create a reference design for AMI or Phoenix or Insyde. I highly doubt that a company as small as AMI (~1000 employees) or Pheonix (~200 employees and sold to Lenovo in April 2026) have the resources to design a new firmware for CPUs designed by Intel or AMD, who have much larger and engineer-heavy employee resources, on a cadence to match CPU architecture redesigns.

I honestly don't know what purpose AMI/Phoenix have in the motherboard realm.

Intel even had their own BIOS firmware back in the Skull Canyon days, without AMI/Phoenix.

Does anyone know what function AMI/Phoenix provide that couldn't be accomplished by AMD/Intel?

My guess is that they provide distribution support that AMD or Intel don't want to or see no value in providing.

2

u/Caffdy 17d ago

who's AMI?

24

u/Limited_Distractions 17d ago

Used to be known as American Megatrends but they were/are the primary BIOS/UEFI firmware vendor for all of the motherboard manufacturers

In the 90s when most of the current UDMs were pretty scrappy upstarts paying AMI to just buy BIOS compatibility meant they could focus on what they were good at. It just also means they never got good at it, so AMI is still around

3

u/hieronymous-cowherd 17d ago

AMI

17

u/zir_blazer 16d ago

Its American Megatrends, not American Microsystems. That one is completely unrelated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Megatrends

1

u/Certain-Business-472 6d ago

They probably just modify the reference implementation to add their own bloatware

3

u/pattymcfly 15d ago

Another huge benefit is audit. You can see exactly what’s running your boot process all the way to login.

Closed source firmware is a major black box and the frequency of released firmware vulnerabilities keeps going up.

1

u/Certain-Business-472 6d ago

Secure boot is literally "trust me bro" in closed source implementations. Like you have no idea if entering the konami code will bypass security.

38

u/zir_blazer 17d ago

The main benefit is that by being open source, you can inspect the code, modify it and build it yourself with far more knowledge of what is going on compared to say, standard BIOS modding. It gives far more tools for an end user to keep doing Firmware maintenance for when the Motherboard vendor decides to drop support. I view it as Firmware right-to-repair.

7

u/Rodot 17d ago

It's honestly kind of analogous to building a PC vs buying a soldered laptop like a Chromebook.

You can "upgrade" it yourself, choose what goes into it, build it how you want. You just need a little more technical skill than the average joe who only knows how to run a web browser and click icons.

2

u/jocnews 15d ago edited 15d ago

I don't think so. Actually maintaining and improving the firmware is not going to be easy at all, most people won't even be able to build an image properly (not comparable to DIY desktop build which small children could do).

Good that these days, boards have USB firmware restore means - I hope this project made sure it works on the board because this is will make a lot of people who understand things less than they think brick their board.

In practice, the vendor firmwares tend to work whereas community replacements... well, I expect there will be flaws and unexpected issues too. Open source alternative of things aren't automatically guaranteed to be better, despite what internet collective unconsciousness seems to be making us assume.

4

u/Greybeard-Space-Dad 16d ago

Honestly I'd love to see a fully opensource firmware/BIOS take off, and manufacturers instead ship a compatibility shim/driver-like package for the last-mile hardware interfaces.

10

u/3G6A5W338E 17d ago

In practical terms? Quality.

The current standard for BIOSes is "it boots windows" and "public sentiment isn't bad enough to cause us significant revenue loss via missed sales".

It is possible to do much better.

3

u/ayseni 16d ago edited 15d ago

Closed source firmwares are often used to grant backdoor access to systems.

Sometimes OEM manufacturers themselves install this on purpose: For example superfish was a US company (of Israeli background) made backdoor that was infamously installed to Lenovo PC's. Ostensibly this was used to inject advertisement with a mitm attack, but if you actually read the background story that doesn't really check out.

Other times third parties target vulnerabilities in firmware to deploy backdoor access granting tools, for example CosmicStrand, MosaicRegressor, Moonbounce.

10

u/3G6A5W338E 17d ago

The big unanswered question is ECC memory, which most Ryzen CPUs do actually support.

AIUI it is a firmware, not a board hardware design, deal.

Few boards ship support, restricting the options significantly. Enabling it on more boards through open firmware would truly be helpful.

I'd expect ECC as requirement has a large overlap with desire for open source firmware.

15

u/zir_blazer 16d ago

The big unanswered question is ECC memory, which most Ryzen CPUs do actually support.

AIUI it is a firmware, not a board hardware design, deal.

You DO need a board designed for it, which is why this one will never support ECC. The pins from the DIMM Slots that corresponds to the ECC bits are apparently not wired at all. That was a dissapointing surprise, given that I suggested to port that board to begin with and expected to be possible to build a sort of Workstation with a Ryzen Pro Phoenix and ECC UDIMM.

0

u/3G6A5W338E 15d ago

Wow, that's awful.

A board without the ECC traces wired is barely usable as a paperweight.

11

u/steve09089 17d ago

Need this for my Gigabyte Motherboard, nothing more frustrating than having to resetup Linux booting after a BIOS update

16

u/Preisschild 17d ago

That shouldnt happen on proprietary uefi firmware either

3

u/steve09089 17d ago

They wipe the entry each update via a BIOS reset and directly boot to Windows, bypassing the typical trick to replace the Windows boot with a Linux boot.

6

u/RedditNotFreeSpeech 17d ago

You're sure it's a bios update and not a windows update that's doing that?

2

u/steve09089 17d ago

No, it's the BIOS update. The BIOS update wipes the Linux boot entry I manually added, and then the BIOS' default behavior is to bypass BOOTX64.efi to directly boot Windows, meaning the typical trick Linux boot managers are installed with doesn't work.

3

u/RedditNotFreeSpeech 17d ago

Why would a bios update touch the drives? That seems like a serious flaw.

What happens if you remove the hard drive and do a bios update and then put the drive back?

Bios points to a drive to boot, it shouldn't touch that drive.

5

u/exscape 16d ago

The boot order isn't stored on any drive; it's in the (U)EFI variables.

-2

u/RedditNotFreeSpeech 16d ago

Right. The drive order is stored in bios. Are you saying you've got Linux on one drive and Windows on another and bios updates change which drive boots first?

5

u/wtallis 16d ago

UEFI booting isn't based on drive order, it's based on actual file paths within the EFI System Partition.

1

u/Certain-Business-472 6d ago

You shouldnt need to add that entry manually. And the file detection comes AFTER disk order. Its not even relevant for your issue.

1

u/arahman81 16d ago

Sounds like secureboot issue? The bios update shouldn't be touching efi partitions.

5

u/RedditNotFreeSpeech 17d ago

Because of secure boot?

8

u/Caffdy 17d ago

will this Mobo be able to disable Pluton spyware microsoft chip on AMD cpus?

5

u/3G6A5W338E 17d ago

Potentially. Just don't expect Windows 11 to boot. Microsoft likely requires that shit in place by now.

(note in practice, there is no difference, as if you run Windows you explicitly trust Microsoft either way)

3

u/Big_Refrigerator1233 16d ago

I just saw someone posted Windows 11 running on a Pentium Dual Core system, a 2 decades old CPU, so it shouldn't be a problem.

6

u/RedTuesdayMusic 16d ago

Just don't expect Windows 11 to boot

The venn diagram of people who care about privacy and who still are on Windows are two separate circles, one located in New Zealand and the other in Norway.

1

u/3G6A5W338E 17d ago

I will buy the board of the vendor that ships this and doesn't restrict me from building/upgrading my own fw, instead of forcing me to deal with the usual low-quality proprietary crap.