Open-Source Dasharo Firmware Runs for the First Time on an AMD Ryzen AM5 Desktop Board

3mdeb, a company that specializes in open-source firmware, has unveiled Dasharo v0.9 for the MSI PRO B850-P WIFI motherboard. This is the first open-source firmware release for a modern desktop board on the AMD Ryzen AM5 platform. It is built on a combination of the new AMD openSIL project and Coreboot, brought together in the proprietary Dasharo stack.

A month earlier, 3mdeb released a similar solution for a Gigabyte server board based on AMD EPYC. In parallel, the engineers were working on porting Dasharo to the consumer MSI PRO B850-P WIFI: the initiative was announced back in February, and over the intervening months the developers brought the work to a finished release, adding support for booting Windows 11 among other things.

An Ordinary Board with Extraordinary Firmware

The MSI PRO B850-P WIFI itself is a run-of-the-mill ATX board for Ryzen 7000- and 9000-series processors, without any standout features. What makes it interesting is precisely the independent port of the open-source firmware, which sets it apart from the rest for Linux and open-source software enthusiasts. The Phoronix author notes that he bought the board for about $179 earlier in the year, whereas now it goes for around $300 at major retailers.

According to the 3mdeb blog, Dasharo v0.9 currently works with Zen 4 Phoenix processors. UEFI Secure Boot is supported, and the operating systems listed as tested are Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and Windows 11 25H2. The rest of the typical functionality should also work, the developers say.

The Phoronix author promises to try out the new firmware on this board himself soon, in order to gauge its stability and performance in practice. The arrival of open-source firmware for a retail-available desktop board is a notable step: until now, similar projects built on the openSIL and Coreboot combination have been limited to a handful of models, more often server or laptop ones.

Source: Phoronix