Raptor Engineering

Raptor Engineering is an American firmware and gateware consulting company, specializing in FPGA and open-source firmware development. Today, they are best known for the IBM POWER-based systems sold by the closely-related Raptor Computing Systems (such as the Talos II and Blackbird).

ASUS coreboot Ports

Prior to Raptor's POWER-based systems, Timothy Pearson of Raptor Engineering was once contracted by Leah Rowe of Libreboot to port coreboot to the KGPE-D16, KCMA-D8, and KFSN4-DRE. Rather than using AMD's existing AGESA and CIMx (as was used in then-upstream but unmaintained ports to the H8QGi-F and H8SCM), the resulting port reimplemented a large amount of hardware initialization code, particularly for RAM initialization and HyperTransport configuration, apparently based on a previous attempt at an out-of-tree native-init port to fam10h. Raptor seemingly stopped development of their x86 Coreboot ports around the time they announced their original Talos project.

Though Raptor's ports powered every coreboot KGPE-D16 and KCMA-D8 until coreboot-15h's AGESA-based port became available, and are likely still used on the vast majority of them, "Raptor raminit" has developed a reputation over time for inconsistent memory compatibility, occasional failures to POST, and, in some configurations, crashes under heavy I/O load. While it can be made to work reasonably, the process of doing so usually involves consulting one of several KGPE-D16 RAM compatibility lists (an example can be found on this wiki's archived KGPE-D16 (Raptor) page), and avoiding use of at least some DIMM slots.