@RedTechEngineer @pernia @romin @mischievoustomato >Does GNU boot even work on systems from the past decade?
No, as almost all AMD and Intel systems from the past decade are all handcuffed making such support cryptographically impossible.

>Isn't the proprietary firmware needed in recent generations of CPUs?
This is the problem of the "firmware" trap - people are not informed of the different kinds of software.

To init most Intel CPUs since 2009, you need a proprietary program that runs on the Management Engine that init's the CPU and starts code execution.

Once code execution starts, the RAM is not working - you need a RAMinit program that runs in the CPU registers and cache only to carry out RAM training.

Manufacturer RAMinit is always proprietary, although free RAMinit has been developed for Sandy bridge for example - although for recent generations nobody has replaced such and it's part of the proprietary binary from Intel.

The other parts of the hardware also need to be init'd - for example graphics, peripherals and host controllers (SATA, usb etc).

On the latest generations, Intel provides a fat "FSP" blob that contains all of such init software and then calls coreboot (which has nothing to do and thus just loads a payload - which can be tianocore or Grub etc).


AMD for recent CPUs doesn't even provide anything - although they have promised to provide "OpenSIL", but it looks like it'll be all proprietary software similar to what Intel has provided to me.


Previously AMD provided partial sources for AGESA (but made the asshole moves of stripping the comments and not providing the source code of RAMinit was done - but free RAMinit was written and some of the comments re-added), which allowed for the KGPE-D16 & KCMA-D8 to be supported, but not much else.


RISC-V will *not* free us, as every single RISC-V SoC and computer I've seen has been as proprietary as hell with proprietary RAMinit and a proprietary bootloader and with poorly documented, or undocumented and patented additional instructions - plus all of such RISC-V processors are slower than the core 2 Duo, or Core 2 Quad, or Opteron 42XX or Opteron 62XX processors, which already have fully free software init too.