Thoughts dereferenced from the scratchpad noise.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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