openSIL

At a recent OCP Regional Summit held in Prague, AMD shared its plans to replace its AMD Generic Encapsulated Software Architecture (AGESA) firmware with an open-source alternative called Open-Source Silicon Initialization Library (openSIL). The new firmware would be ready for production use in 2026, following a multi-year, four phase development cycle. Firmware is a crucial component for modern computer systems, and on modern AMD systems, that critical code blob is AGESA. Among other things, AGESA is responsible for initializing several sub-systems of the platform, including processor cores, chipset, and memory; and it is frequently updated to support new hardware and resolve bugs. But for all the utility that firmware brings, it can also be a weak point in a system via vulnerable to cyber attacks. So...