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Article published by: Leah Rowe

Date of publication: 16 July 2023

Libreboot 20211122 was the last release to officially support these boards: ASUS KFSN4-DRE, KCMA-D8 and KGPE-D16; they were removed much later, in subsequent releases.

I’m pleased to announce that they have, today, been re-added to lbmk.git. This is the automated build system that builds Libreboot ROM images, and Libreboot releases, ready for installation.

These boards are available now, if you’re willing to build Libreboot from source; otherwise, you will find them in the next regular release of Libreboot.

It was implemented with this patch: https://browse.libreboot.org/lbmk.git/commit/?id=af084014f04602f570a23b0cc23a112401348faf

The following changes have been made, relative to Libreboot 20211122:

• Coreboot 4.11_branch (branch) used, instead of regular 4.11 (release tag). This contains many fixes on top of the original Coreboot 4.11 release that Libreboot used.
• I fixed several errors, enabling coreboot’s crossgcc toolchain compilers from 4.11_branch to build properly, on modern distros; Debian Sid was tested, and Arch Linux should work too. Without these patches, it would not build at all.
• Fixed downloading of acpica (for use of iasl) in the coreboot crossgcc build script; the upstream link for tarballs of acpica were no longer online. Coreboot switched to github in newer revisions, but this older one needed patching. I ended up hosting the relevant tarball myself, on Libreboot rsync. The mirrors now have it, and Libreboot’s modified coreboot 4.11_branch uses that.
• Libreboot’s build system (lbmk.git) has been modified, to make it avoid building GCC Gnat, in crossgcc from coreboot 4.11_branch. Coreboot implements video initialisation in Ada on many platforms, but these AMD boards use AST (Aspeed) framebuffer chips, where coreboot video initialisation is written in normal C. This avoids having to deal with build issues, when building older Gnat with newer host Gnat

The PIKE2008 fix from Libreboot 20211122 was retained, and it is included in today’s change. This inserts an empty option ROM in CBFS, without which SeaBIOS would hang; the empty option ROM prevents SeaBIOS from loading the real one.

Libreboot does not yet integrate Dasharo.

Dasharo has support for ASUS KGPE-D16 on a much newer version of coreboot, where upstream coreboot had deleted KFSN4-DRE/KCMA-D8/KGPE-D16 support just after the 4.11 release; however, Dasharo only supports KGPE-D16 (out of these boards).

I intend to study code differences between D8/D16 in time, and port those to Dasharo so that it can have a KCMA-D8 port. I then wish to use this in Libreboot. I could use Dasharo now, for D16, regardless. For now, the main priority is to have support for these boards again in Libreboot.

The previous news announcement said that I would only add these boards after doing that, but I felt this work is worthy enough for entry in the main branch of Libreboot. Any issues that it has will be similar to what was present in the Libreboot 20211122 release (Dasharo made a lot of improvements, especially to raminit).

I would like it if people can provide testing for all of these boards, in today’s Libreboot’s revisions. Learn here how to become a board tester for the Libreboot project.

Markdown file for this page: https://libreboot.org/news/fam15h.md

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