Linux PC build (2025)

Hello,

it’s me again. Some of you might remember me from this post, in which I was asking for feedback to build a Linux PC in 2025.

Stuff happened and I didn’t went through with it. So this still my first attempt at a build. Well now I’ve got time and want to try it again.

As you may notice, I’ve ditched the Z790-9 mother board in favor of a MSI PRO B650M-P. My dream of building a coreboot-system is officially dead, thus I decided to build an AMD-System.

Short Listing:

If you notice anything wrong or have suggestions/improvements don’t hesitate to point them out.

Thanks in advance!!!

Specifications:

      • nanook@friendica.eskimo.com
        2·
        2 days ago

        @marauding_gibberish142 I personally find the Intel ME a useful feature, it’s nice for example to be able to upgrade BIOS without a CPU and/or memory, this has allowed me for example to upgrade the BIOS to a version needed for a newer CPU on a board with a BIOS that didn’t initially support it without needing the older CPU to perform the upgrade. And from a security standpoint, if you do not enable and configure the network stack, and you don’t have a DHCP server available to it for it do so on it’s own, I really don’t see what it can do that is harmful.

        • marauding_gibberish142@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          2·
          2 days ago

          How do you not configure the network stack? If you have an Intel NIC on the motherboard/any PCIE lanes in theory it should be able to connect.

          What worries me is that someone could perform a reverse shell on my system with/in addition to a magic packet and get full ring 0 access to my system. I’m investigating network monitoring tools that can help me find traces of ME on my network.

    • Jeena@piefed.jeena.netEnglish
      31·
      2 days ago

      Because coreboot is the only way for us to be in full control of the hardware. Any other way there is microcode which is closed source and we have no idea what it is doing. It has full control to everything.

      • nanook@friendica.eskimo.com
        2·
        2 days ago

        @jeena I grant you that is true, but under Linux, the kernel talks to the hardware directly after boot, not through BIOS calls. About the only time you would talk to the BIOS after boot is for sleep/suspend, or in rare cases such as the server my friendica instance runs on, for temp/CPU speed control because Linux kernel has issues properly using the MSR on the i9-10980xe, oddly it does not seem to have the same issue on the i9-10900x which is a ten core CPU in the same family, so I am forced to depend upon ACPI since talking to the hardware directly in this specific case is problematic. If you were running Windows or if you had weird hardware that is somewhat broken under Linux like mine, I can see the need, or if a laptop and you wanted sleep/suspend functionality. But for what you describe it isn’t clear the benefits. And there are some risks like it probably isn’t going to do the extensive memory training of a more advanced UEFI bios like American Megatrends, so your memory access may not be as efficient as it could be, and you’re more limited in hardware selection.

      • catloaf@lemm.eeEnglish
        3·
        2 days ago

        There’s still microcode and other firmware blobs. Coreboot is just BIOS.