Thoughts dereferenced from the scratchpad noise.

MSI PRO B850-P coreboot port: fTPM, fast boot, and cross-OS validation

Published at July 2, 2026 · Michał Żygowski · 26 min read

Continuing the MSI PRO B850-P coreboot port series, this post covers the resolution of the amdgpu hard fault that required the nomodeset workaround, AMD firmware TPM support with ROM Armor 3 integration, Promontory21 configuration improvements, EZ Debug LED support, fast boot via APOB memory context restore, and the cross-OS validation campaign that confirmed Linux and Windows 11 fully operational....

Categories: firmware

MSI PRO B850-P coreboot port: GFX init, Promontory21, and ACPI improvements

Published at June 3, 2026 · Michał Żygowski · 21 min read

Continuing the MSI PRO B850-P coreboot port series, this post covers the completion of GFX initialization in Phoenix openSIL, full Promontory21 I/O chipset support, AMD P-state CPPC enablement, AMD GOP driver integration in EDK2, and a range of ACPI, eSPI, and PCIe improvements that bring Linux to a fully graphical boot....

Categories: firmware

Gigabyte MZ33-AR1 Dasharo v0.9.0 Released

Published at May 15, 2026 · Michał Żygowski · 8 min read

Dasharo v0.9.0 for the Gigabyte MZ33-AR1 server board is now available, bringing initial open-source firmware support based on coreboot 25.12 and AMD openSIL for the Turin processor family. This post covers the features included in the release, the known issues, testing environment improvements for AMD platforms, and a commentary on the platform openness score....

Categories: firmware

Stop rewriting your pipelines - achieving CI portability with Docker and Taskfile

Published at April 27, 2026 · Maciej Pijanowski · 18 min read

After years of reacting to CI platform changes and rewriting pipeline definitions, we decided to research a better approach. This post describes our evaluation of different solutions and why we settled on treating CI systems as interchangeable orchestration layers, with build logic living in portable Docker containers orchestrated by Taskfile. We plan to adopt this approach more widely and see how it holds up in practice....

Categories: miscellaneous

MSI PRO B850-P coreboot port: USB initialization and AM5 IP block porting

Published at April 27, 2026 · Michał Żygowski · 17 min read

Continuing the MSI PRO B850-P coreboot port series, this post covers the porting of CCX and FCH IP blocks to AMD Phoenix AM5 in openSIL, including nearly 1000 lines of missing USB initialization code. We describe the RcMgr MMIO fix, the DF and APOB analysis, early GFX attempts, and the integration of automated test infrastructure....

Categories: firmware

What Open Source Firmware Can Learn from Apple Pre-OS Security

Published at April 24, 2026 · Piotr Król · 17 min read

Apple Platform Security Guide is the most comprehensive platform security documentation in the industry. Instead of dismissing it as closed-source irrelevance, we read it through a firmware engineer's lens and extracted transferable security patterns for x86 and ARM open source firmware. Here is what we found about boot chains, Secure Enclave architecture, and five opportunities for Dasharo and coreboot....

Categories: firmware security

MSI PRO B850-P coreboot port: Phoenix openSIL AM5 IP block porting

Published at April 3, 2026 · Michał Żygowski · 14 min read

Continuing the MSI PRO B850-P coreboot port series, this post covers the porting of Phoenix AM5 specific code to openSIL. We describe the progress on NBIO, SMU, MPIO and GFX IP blocks, the chipset authentication breakthrough, SMM initialization challenges, and the current state of the platform including a successful OS boot....

Categories: firmware

MSI PRO B850-P coreboot port: PCIe and USB descriptors and Phoenix OpenSIL

Published at March 6, 2026 · Michał Żygowski · 17 min read

Continuing the journey of porting MSI PRO B850-P to coreboot. This post covers the port configuration phase: USB and PCIe MPIO descriptors derived from hardware topology discovery. It also describes the integration of Phoenix OpenSIL as a Proof of Concept and the challenges encountered compared to the Genoa and Turin platforms....

Categories: firmware

New adventure: Porting MSI PRO B850-P to coreboot

Published at February 9, 2026 · Michał Żygowski · 28 min read

The blog post describes the effort made to port a modern AMD desktop board to coreboot. The target is MSI PRO B850-P, supporting AMD AM5 socket processor family and Phoenix OpenSIL....

Categories: firmware

Dasharo TrustRoot Ephemeral Key Incident

Published at December 22, 2025 · Michał Kopeć · Maciej Pijanowski · 8 min read

This report details a release engineering incident where a Dasharo firmware update successfully performed End-of-Manufacturing (EOM) fusing on NovaCustom laptops but utilized an ephemeral testing key instead of the persistent production key. We provide a technical analysis of the situation and outline impact for affected end users....

Categories: firmware security

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MSI PRO B850-P coreboot port: fTPM, fast boot, and cross-OS validation

MSI PRO B850-P coreboot port: GFX init, Promontory21, and ACPI improvements

Gigabyte MZ33-AR1 Dasharo v0.9.0 Released

Stop rewriting your pipelines - achieving CI portability with Docker and Taskfile

MSI PRO B850-P coreboot port: USB initialization and AM5 IP block porting

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