A System76 engineer is porting coreboot to newer AMD Zen systems

System76 have begun providing more AMD based hardware for Linux enthusiasts, and the next step in their plan to be as open as possible appears to have begun.

They're certainly busy! After announcing the AMD powered Serval WS back in early June, they also then revealed the Oryx Pro later in June which was their first laptop with Coreboot, Open Controller Firmware and NVIDIA all together. This is all on top of working on their own Linux distribution too with Pop!_OS which launched the 20.04 LTS at the end of April.

Keeping things interesting and exciting, while no official product announcement has been made, writing on Twitter the System76 Principal Engineer, Jeremy Soller, mentioned this:

I have seen the light of the great @LisaSu. Today begins my journey to port coreboot to Matisse and Renoir. See you on the other side!

This would replace the proprietary BIOS found in their newer AMD laptops, making the systems that little bit more open which is a wonderful thing. It could also result in faster boot times, it's more flexible and of course control for the end user since coreboot is open source.

One thing to be aware of, is that only coreboot directly is being mentioned so far and it seems the AMD Platform Security Processor (also known as AMD Secure Technology) will still be there with its proprietary bits. The result though and the point is just having more of the system open as much as possible. It's also entirely possible in future the work may progress onto dealing with that too somehow.

While System76 have yet to announce anything formally for coreboot and newer AMD Zen products in their lineup, it's worth mentioning that when Soller previously teased the NVIDIA work that same month System76 went onto announce the Oryx Pro. If / when they do announce something, we will let you know.

You can check out their Linux hardware on System76.com. They're easily one of the top Linux vendors around.