3mdeb/Dasharo has discontinued Heads on MSI desktops, time to upstream?

[mblanqui]

3mdeb has discontinued all development of Heads for their coreboot distribution on MSI desktops.

@scallyob great, thanks for testing. However, as the heads product on MSI desktops is discontinued (meaning we don't plan to provide new release for it), everybody will have to rebuild their ROMs themselves to fix it :(

Originally posted by @miczyg1 in #1189

Could development/updates be handled upstream from now on?

[miczyg1]

Could development/updates be handled upstream from now on?

That would be ideal. But somebody would have to take this effort.

@tlaurion already tried very hard to coordinate it and nobody at 3mdeb has any spare resources to do it.

[Hexdigest123]

Could development/updates be handled upstream from now on?

That would be ideal. But somebody would have to take this effort.

@tlaurion already tried very hard to coordinate it and nobody at 3mdeb has any spare resources to do it.

What would need to be done to make this possible?

[miczyg1]

What would need to be done to make this possible?

1. Take all the Dasharo modifications and rebase them on linuxboot/heads master.
2. Check if all modifications are still needed for the MSI to work correctly. Drop the obsolete ones.
3. Test and verify if everything works.
4. Get the changes merged to linuxboot/heads

tl;dr

Time is needed and some familiarity with heads. Anybody is free to take those changes and try to get the MSI desktops on linuxboot/heads

[tlaurion]

@Tonux599 attempted port recently (he uses his fork meanwhile) #1962 (comment)

This is stalled until the stability issue #1962 (comment) is resolved.

Until then the following is what I'm using on my Z790-P (DDR5) board. It uses Dasharo's v0.9.2 release.

https://github.com/Tonux599/heads/tree/my-custom-msi_z790p_ddr5

For reference, stability issue is

@miczyg1 I'm getting frequent kernel panics (in heads only, not when booted to Qubes) like:

mce: CPUs not responding to MCE broadcast (may include false positives): 2-3
Kernel panic - not syncing: Timeout: Not all CPUs entered broadcast exception handler

Looking around about MCE's, I came across your issue below, do you think they are related? https://mail.coreboot.org/hyperkitty/list/coreboot@coreboot.org/thread/MW44TIEMFMVDWPVCAFPE2QUFXXGZYYAX/

@Tonux599 @miczyg1 status update?

[Tonux599]

My fork is working flawlessly for my use case but has become tainted by things I specifically need (disabled onboard vga, disabled hyperthreading, loading gpu blobs, forcing XMP).

There's some small annoyances too, like flashtools cbfs needing a workaround which is slow. If this was fixed that would be nice.

I could probably get a working PR done quite quickly that is on par with Dasharo's release, as basically all the work is done.

@tlaurion i could do a msi_z790p_ddr5 and a UNTESTED_msi_z690a_ddr4, UNTESTED_msi_z690a_ddr5, and UNTESTED_msi_z790p_ddr4?

Also would need to split off Dasharo's MSI releases in the coreboot module, prefer not to use main/master. Can't remember if I did this already.

[miczyg1]

@Tonux599 attempted port recently (he uses his fork meanwhile) #1962 (comment)

This is stalled until the stability issue #1962 (comment) is resolved.
Until then the following is what I'm using on my Z790-P (DDR5) board. It uses Dasharo's v0.9.2 release.
https://github.com/Tonux599/heads/tree/my-custom-msi_z790p_ddr5

For reference, stability issue is

@miczyg1 I'm getting frequent kernel panics (in heads only, not when booted to Qubes) like:

mce: CPUs not responding to MCE broadcast (may include false positives): 2-3
Kernel panic - not syncing: Timeout: Not all CPUs entered broadcast exception handler

Looking around about MCE's, I came across your issue below, do you think they are related? https://mail.coreboot.org/hyperkitty/list/coreboot@coreboot.org/thread/MW44TIEMFMVDWPVCAFPE2QUFXXGZYYAX/

@Tonux599 @miczyg1 status update?

None at this point. For some reason it doesn't trigger on our releases.

[Tonux599]

None at this point. For some reason it doesn't trigger on our releases.

For the avoidance of doubt, the stability issue was only present using Linux + coreboot 25.03. Linux + Dasharo (latest MSI release) is fine.

I'll have a PR open for these boards by the weekend.

@mblanqui @Hexdigest123 can you state which varient you are using? I can then add you to the testers list in the PR. Thanks.

[Tonux599]

PR open #1995

Draft at the moment. Testing my board on Thursday 28th.