AMD Fellow and Chief Firmware Architect Raj Kapoor issued a document stating that the company is committed to the development of open source system firmware, and introduced the related solution AMD openSIL in detail.
AMD believes that one of the ways to improve security is to open up the Silicon Initialization Firmware architecture, development, and verification to the open source community. AMD is committed to open source software and is now expanding into various firmware areas through the re-architecture of the x86 AGESA FW stack - with UEFI design as host firmware design to prevent scaling, and other host firmware solutions such as coreboot, oreboot, FortiBIOS, Project µ wait. A newer open architecture with potentially reduced attack surface and apparently infinite scalability is now available for evaluation in the open source community as a proof of concept called AMD openSIL – Open-Source Silicon Initialization Library.
According to the introduction, AMD openSIL has written a set of agnostic library functions in an industry standard language, which can be statically linked to the host firmware without having to abide by any host firmware protocol. AMD openSIL is designed to be scalable, easy to integrate, lightweight, low-frequency , and transparent, thereby potentially improving the security posture.
AMD openSIL includes three statically linked libraries - xSIM (x86 Silicon Initialization Libraries), xPRF (x86 Platform Reference Library) and xUSL (x86 Utilities & Services Library) that can be statically linked to any host firmware during compilation/linking. The diagram below shows scalability between two different platform host firmware solutions - UEFI and coreboot:
AMD has also partnered with other organizations in the open source space, 9elements, AMI, AWS, 3mdeb, Datacom, Google, Meta, Oxide, and others, to develop the first AMD openSIL instance based on 4th Gen AMD EPYC CPUs. As planned, they will demonstrate their capabilities at the OCP Regional Summit in the second quarter of 2023 (4.19 – 4.20) .
In general, upcoming releases specifically include:
- AMD openSIL library designed for 4th generation EPYC SoCs
- openSIL Coreboot Integrator Guide
- AMD openSIL Firmware Architecture Specification
- Coreboot integration related to 4th Gen EPYC based AMD CRB platforms
- AMI Aptio OpenEdition related to 4th Gen EPYC based AMD CRB platforms
It is worth noting, however, that the development of openSIL is still in its infancy and is not yet production ready. The disclaimer states that the AMD openSIL firmware library and associated host firmware are released as proof-of-concept (PoC) code for a 4th Gen AMD EPYC-based reference platform. This PoC code is not yet intended for production use. AMD openSIL code is provided "as-is".
More details can be found on the official blog .