> Minisforum only screwed up the bios per my research which is inconvenient
What do you mean?
What do you mean?
Examples: click in to any given product on https://minisforum.com/support/#/ and there's a <20% chance there's been a bios update ever. CWWK's support page is a cloud-drive page (kind of cool actually!) with filenames in Chinese, but it does seem like oh some of their products are supported/maintained. For example, their recentest AMD nas bios release was early may: https://pan.x86pi.cn/BIOS%E6%9B%B4%E6%96%B0/3.NAS%E5%AD%98%E... but many product seem to have only a single bios. Topdon reportedly offers no support.
That's just not really acceptable these days. AMD is revving their agesa too frequently to let your system forever be tied to a point in time release.
Its probably going to start boutique as hell & be available for almost nothing, but if and when AMD ships OpenSIL to start replacing close agesa, that could uncouple this huge constraint. Enable folks to start maintaining their systems.
Coreboot has been the main focus for a while, because boot infrastructure plus binary initialization payloads (AMD's FSP) is the best we could hope for. For some motherboards we can compile our own & maintain systems. Here's some cheap-ish firewall devices discussion, https://hagensieker.com/2020/11/08/firewalls-and-bioss-and-c... . Framework 13 will be one of the few consumer systems to get CoreBoot. https://www.phoronix.com/news/Framework-13-AMD-Coreboot-WIP . But the level of effort is high here, folks carefully puzzling out how to boot motherboards. It's un-ideal, special every time it feels like, albeit the CoreBoot platform gets better and better.
Right now it's just vertically integrated system builders like Oxide going further really having custody of what's running. Back to OpenSIL, the hope is that users really could load whatever platform and boot code they want, could maintain it themselves. If they have a base starting place, if someone goes about upstreaming or supporting the coreboot release.
Ideally we would have some open reference architectures that folks would just plop down. "Here's our motherboard, it's embedded controller runs upstream supported Zephyr cores and peripherals, flash it as usual." This is what Oxide is building for themselves (atop their own embedded OS, Hubris https://hubris.oxide.computer/ ), and what I wish OpenCompute or someone would help jumpstart.
(Responding to the submission, this system looks sick as heck. I wonder how many watts it can do? I'd also maybe be interested in an AirJet mini-PC, since that's extremely compact, radically more efficient than fans, and not silent but very quiet. But it'd need to be scaled up or out beyond what we currently see it used for.)