AMD openSIL CPU Firmware Experiment Heading to Consumer AM5 Boards

Last autumn , AMD provided an update regarding developmental progress of its openSIL open-source project. According to Raj Kapoor's presentation at last year's OCP Global Summit, the Red Team intends to publish its sixth-generation "Zen 6"-based EPYC "Venice" CPU openSIL sources at some point in 2026. The company's lead firmware architect reiterated that the newer silicon-initialization stack will eventually replace the familiar legacy AGESA firmware line. As of last summer , only one section of AMD's "Zen 5" family has received openSIL support—the EPYC 9005 "Turin" server processor product range. Earlier this week, a 3mbdeb blog entry detailed a compelling experiment that involved the initial "enabling (of) AMD AM5 'Phoenix' support in Coreboot." In the past, this Polish open-source consulting company has experimented with unusual ports of OpenSIL and Coreboot (via the Dasharo distribution). NLnet Foundation funding provided a secure base to start 3mbdeb's Gigabyte MZ33-AR1 porting project , leading to present-day tinkering with MSI's PRO B850-P consumer-grade mainboard design.

Mid-way through their post, they detail a handful of problems, including: "some issues may arise when parsing combo images for AM5 desktop platforms. The desktop images are more complex than server ones. A single PSP (Platform Security Processor) directory may support multiple CPU families, whereas on servers, each CPU family required separate PSP directory. This adds complexity, a need to distinguish PSP directories from each other, and determine the supported CPUs by given directory." So far, the MSI B850-P Pro-based tests have reached a phase of development that is "just enough to (achieve) boot." When outlining a next major milestone, 3mbdeb intends to: "add basic support for desktop AM5 'Phoenix' platform to distinguish mobile CPUs from desktop CPUs in Coreboot. This will serve as a base to cover the differences between the mobile and desktop Phoenix SoCs/APUs." They stress that their 'Phoenix' OpenSIL project is still in a "Proof of Concept" stage, so "not intended for production use." In summary, 3mbdeb's firmware engineer (Michał Żygowski) recommends that external testers wait for the arrival of "exciting" future releases.

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