Libreboot: Freedom-Respecting Boot Firmware

Exactly. Initialising DDR memory in any kind of system is a bit of a black art for this reason, even when the chips are soldered to the same PCB as the SOC, let alone when there's two unknown PCBs and two sockets in the mix.

* All cores are brought out of reset. All cores start executing code from the end of 32b physical address space, hopefully some EPROM with firmware lives there. (One thing of note is that yes, intel says that there is no such thing as "unreal mode", but everything after i386 boots into unreal mode)

* Initial state of EDX signifies the position of CPU in SMP system, one core is designated as system processor, all other are application processors and thus do minimal APIC initialization and then enter halt and wait for IPI.

* The system processor continues executing its firmware and its first order of bussiness is to configure cache controllers as to get even a few kilobytes of writable SRAM for its data area.

* SP initializes enough of on-board PCIe devices to be able to access SMBus/SPD

* SP scans SPD to get list of populated DIMMs, their sizing and timing

* SP converts the SPD data into memory controller configuration and writes it there (note that at this point we are still doing XIP from slow-ish SPI Flash and have no RAM to speak of, so code that does this has to be very efficient, which is the reason for various RAM incompatibilities, as somehow common approach is to just hardcode expected configurations into the firmware).

* SP looks into NVRAM if the DIMM configuration is same as was on previous boot, if it is it skips the next step

* If it changed the SP enters the DDR4 link training algorithm. This essentially involves measuring lengths of wires from memory controller to individual DRAM chips. The idea there is that it is impossible to make them well-enough matched for the frequencies involved, so the deliberate difference is compensated for in logic and software (also it saves space on PCB of both motherboard and the DIMMs themselves).

* The result of training is written into configuration registers of the DRAM chips and memory controller (and saved into NVRAM for next boot, as the training is somewhat slow)

* We have RAM.

* Firmware completes initialization of PCIe topology, enables LPC bridge.

* Firmware does PCI(e) resource allocation. (The "PNP OS installed" switch in many BIOS configurations controls whether it configures all PCI devices or only these that it deems relevant)

* We have something that looks like PC.

* What one would call traditional PC-style POST happens now. First phase of ROM SCAN (in BIOS/CSM case) causes the VGA controller to come out of reset. Display turns on and user sees something like "Copyright (C) NVidia/AMD" in top-left corner

* Firmware draws its splashscreen/UI.

* Firmware completes all other initialization tasks (now running in somewhat sane environment). This involves entering protected mode and in CSM/BIOS case exiting it again (sometimes even multiple times). Various datastructures that are going to be passed to OS get filled in. List of boot devices is built. (this is the step that user perceives as "POST")

* Bootloader gets loaded from whatever device was selected and control is passed to it.

[Edit: and to make it even more interesting modern CPUs often need microcode update to be applied somewhere pretty early along this process]

[Edit2: it is my understanging that on at least some x86 server platforms the memory initialization is done by BMC although I'm not sure how exactly that works... bitbanging the DDR4 controller over JTAG?]