coreboot on POWER9
summary
Coreboot is ported to POWER9 on Talos II and Talos II Lite, producing a working boot path that replaces the 1.7M-line hostboot stack with a much smaller codebase, fits the whole CBFS and payload into a ~2 MB coreboot image, and reduces cold boot from hostboot’s ~63 seconds to ~34–42 seconds depending on debug output. Work required ~15k LOC for memory training plus OCC/HOMER, involved SCOM reverse engineering and a hostboot code audit that found real bugs and undocumented registers, and is upstreaming changes with 3mdeb and Insurgo.
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chapters (20)
- 0:00Introduction
- 2:36Why
- 5:20Compression
- 10:43Context of code
- 13:47Ascom registers
- 15:42Memory initialization
- 17:02occComplex
- 18:01Homer
- 19:11Documentation
- 20:48Hostboot vs Coreboot
- 23:09Serial log
- 28:23Boot dock
- 29:57Community
- 31:40Conclusion
- 33:10Questions
- 36:42Ease of use
- 38:15Code design
- 41:42Could it go away
- 42:58extensible
- 44:41variance
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