Open-Source Success Achieved For Greater Transparency & Security: Running AMD openSIL + Coreboot On EPYC
Of course, one of the immediate items I was interested in seeing was how well the performance and power efficiency compared when running Dasharo's Coreboot and openSIL compared to the default BIOS shipped by Gigabyte.
Up first was looking at the AMD EPYC 9655P with 12 x 64GB DDR5-4800 memory, 3.2TB Micron NVMe SSD on this Gigabyte MZ33-AR1 EPYC 9005 motherboard. I ran more than 120 benchmarks across many different areas to see how the performance would compare....
Long story short, the Dasharo performance led to effectively the same performance as the default proprietary BIOS performance overall. No overall loss in performance in going for the AMD openSIL / open-source option.
Equally important was finding no hit to the power consumption either. When looking at the CPU power consumption via the RAPL/PowerCap interfaces or the overall system power consumption exposed via the Corsair PSU, the power consumption was similar. In fact, on average the power consumption was a few Watts lower with Dasharo.
👁 AMD EPYC with openSIL and Coreboot using 3mdeb Dasharo
I also did run benchmarks with the AMD EPYC 9745 Turin Dense CPU as well once the initial issues were sorted out in getting Turin Dense running on Dasharo. And, again, no performance loss or other concerns hit in my testing thus far.
It was very gratifying to finally run AMD openSIL and Coreboot on a current-generation, readily-available EPYC server motherboard! Something that can't be said at the moment either on the Intel Xeon 6 side. Huge kudos to 3mdeb for pulling off this Gigabyte MZ33-AR1 port and I am eager to try out their MSI motherboard port too for Ryzen 9000 series. While AMD openSIL won't be reaching production status until Zen 6, this initial experience on Zen 5 after working through the initial issues has been great. I'll keep on running my Gigabyte MZ33-AR1 benchmark server with Dasharo.
Those wishing to learn more about 3mdeb's Dasharo port for the MZ33-AR1 can do so via Dasharo.com.
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