AMD's open-source openSIL firmware is being ported to Zen 5 motherboard early — replacement for AGESA shows up ahead of Zen 6

AMD is getting ready to ditch its AGESA microcode design in favor of an open-source successor dubbed openSIL, starting with Zen 6. In the meantime, 3mbdeb, a Polish open-source consulting firm, has announced that the first stages of porting openSIL to a consumer Zen 5 motherboard are underway.

The MSI B850-P Pro is the board 3mbdeb chose. If you're an enthusiast for this kind of stuff, you can now take openSIL for a spin before it shows up with AMD's next-generation CPUs, though the firm warns that this is a "proof of concept" that is "not intended for production use." Work on getting openSIL plus Coreboot on the MSI board is based on earlier work surrounding the Gigabyte MZ33-AR1, a server board designed to run AMD's EPYC 9005 series CPUs. AMD published its openSIL initialization code for the aforementioned Turin server chips well before AMD published the same code for its desktop Phoenix CPUs. As a result, the B850-P Pro is benefiting from the development work already put into the aforementioned Gigabyte board.

Silicon firmware like openSIL and AGESA are responsible for making sure major components hooked up to the motherboard are operational, and initiate key components such as the CPU, RAM, and chipset. Without these microcode platforms, your computer would not boot at all. They serve as part of the larger firmware stack, connecting the silicon to the host firmware, such as UEFI, or in this case, Coreboot.

OpenSIL represents a big improvement in the way code is inspected and guarded against cyberattacks over AMD's outgoing AGESA platform. AGESA's main problem is that the code is closed-source, preventing users from inspecting the firmware code for security purposes, bug checking, or other purposes. With openSIL, AMD has improved on this by making the new firmware open-source. openSIL will also be easier to scale and more lightweight compared to AGESA, according to AMD, and accommodate different host firmware. AGESA is designed around UEFI as the host firmware.

There's not much reason to run openSIL right now if you own an MSI B850-P Pro. Coreboot's initial support for openSIL with the B850-P Pro is still in development and the board is technically not on Coreboot's support list yet. But, it is a great option for developers and enthusiasts to tinker with openSIL to check out its inner workings and see how AMD has better designed it compared to AGESA.

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