Virtually Attend FOSDEM 2026

This talk presents a practical approach to building a high‑assurance core infrastructure for home and small business environments, using modern open firmware on commodity server hardware.

As AI workloads move from cloud to on‑premise, the need for trustworthy and attestable hardware platforms for running models and handling sensitive data becomes critical. But what does "trustworthy" actually mean at the hardware/firmware level, and can we realistically achieve it with today’s platforms?

We will walk through how to build a system based on a modern AMD server board combined with open‑source firmware (coreboot[1] and OpenSIL[2]) to gain more control and transparency across the boot chain. We will discuss:

• How open firmware and silicon initialization enable a stronger supply chain transparency and verifiability
• How to establish, measure, and attest a minimal and understandable firmware and software stack
• How to combine this with AMD’s security and confidential computing features to protect workloads and keys
• Practical pitfalls when deploying such systems at home or in small organizations

The goal is to show how open firmware can complement security and confidentiality computing features to create a platform you can actually inspect, reason about, and attest from top to bottom - rather than treating the hardware and firmware as opaque, trusted black boxes.

[1] https://www.coreboot.org/ [2] https://github.com/openSIL/openSIL