Firmware 2.10 available for Talos II and Blackbird

Raptor has released firmware updates for Talos II and Blackbird (version 2.10). I'm still between residences but I intend to install this myself on both my machines in the next couple days. The biggest update is that Skiroot makes a big jump to kernel 6.6 which hopefully should solve glitches like Petitboot pooping its pants on XFS volumes with stuck log entries, not that that's ever happened to me twice, and there is a tweak for sporadic crashes on systems with more than 8 cores. Officially this wasn't a supported configuration on the Blackbirds, but there are people who try, and it's definitely appreciated for T2 and T2 Lite. Hostboot, HCODE, Skiboot, Skiroot and Petitboot are also all pulled up to current, InfiniBand drivers are now live in Skiroot (and thus Petitboot), and the Hostboot runtime has been compressed to give you more headroom in the BOOTKERNFW partition.

An intriguing change for the future also in this release is to enable firmware component signature checks during IPL by default. But using what key, you ask? You didn't sign anything! The key is the insecure known key in the official firmware builds, which adds no security currently and doesn't look any different from before, but provides the framework for you signing it later. At that point you'd sign it with your own key and provide that; now everything is already set up, and the process should "just work" with fewer steps. This is a long-running entry I keep intending to write and this is a good excuse to do that in the near future.