coreboot for Talos II and Talos II Lite: we looking for beta testers

[pietrushnic]

Hi all,
as some of you may know 3mdeb works on behalf of Insurgo on porting hostboot to coreboot for Talos II and Talos II Lite. We worked over year on this project and we finally at the stage of looking for beta testers. If you are interested feel free to let us know. Initial steps how you can help us you can find in documentation.

If looking for some argumentation why we doing this our Firmware Engineer Krystian gave good initial justification in this blog post.

[MauryG5]

Dear friends and colleagues of the Power community good afternoon,
I follow what was written by the new friend of the Pietrusnico forum, to whom I warmly welcome among us, to tell you that I am collaborating with him and his company 3MDEB, to test and see how it behaves, the CoreBoot firmware they are already working on for some time he and his entire company 3MDEB. It seems that from the first impressions and the first information I have, the new firmware in CoreBoot boots much faster than the standard one, so the development looks very interesting for the future of OpenPower and our beloved architecture. As soon as I have more specific tests I will update you below and I will try to post my first impressions ... I also wanted to take the opportunity to tell the friend ClassicHas of Talospace, to contact Pietrusnico as soon as possible, because he needs to talk to him about the possibility of putting various information on this project, also on Talospace ...

Stay tuned for various updates on this new CoreBoot firmware ...!

[pietrushnic]

I was already contacted by @Borely and @MPC7500, which may be interested in this topic. I will also try to bring Insurgo here which sponsor whole effort. One of the thing I'm looking from community is beta testing, but also content marketing, business intelligence/insights as well as constructive criticism of the project.

From news today I submited "coreboot on POWER9" talk to OpenPOWER Summit 2021 with following abstract:

coreboot is open source firmware development framework that powers more then 10% of desktops, laptops and workstations. It supports multiple architetcures: x86, ARM, ARM64, RISC-V. Bringing it to OpenPOWER means introduction of established and sizable community, diverse economy of licensed service providers as well as less complexity during new hardware integration.

This talk will present the progress of porting the POWER9 architecture to coreboot along with Talos II and Talos II Lite machines (FSF RYF certified). This project became possible with the cooperation of 3mdeb Embedded Systems Consulting and Insurgo Technologies Libres/Open Technologies. We will present problems and hardships encountered during the work and other exciting stories with the initial results of the first hostboot code audit conducted as part of the work. Finally, we will present the current state of the booting process on Talos II using coreboot.

[Insurgo]

Hello everyone!

I would love to point where the action is happening.

Releases: https://github.com/3mdeb/openpower-coreboot-docs/tree/main/releases
Documentation (amazing work here): https://github.com/3mdeb/openpower-coreboot-docs
Heads port: https://github.com/osresearch/heads/pull/1002

Nice to finally land here. Will follow up closely this forum.

Thierry Laurion
Insurgo
Empower yourself.

[Borley]

Are there any plans for adapting this also to Blackbird?

[khebel]

Just a rough idea of what would have to be changed and/or parametrized, we don't own any Blackbird board so no way of testing. No precise estimations (then again, estimations for Talos II were far from precise...), but given enough resources I'd say it would be possible.

[JeremyRand]

What's the status on dual-CPU support? According to https://github.com/3mdeb/openpower-coreboot-docs/blob/main/devnotes/documentation.md , it's not supported, but the blogpost at https://web.archive.org/web/20220926061511/https://blog.3mdeb.com/2022/2022-04-12-talos2_2nd_cpu_and_testing/ suggests that it may be working.

Also, can https://blog.3mdeb.com/ please unblock Tor users? Tor users currently get "Your IP has been banned".