2013/2/21 ron minnich rminnich@gmail.com:
I just updated it. https://code.google.com/p/i915tool/ I had to wait, starting some time ago, because there was too much info appearing in it about this: http://techland.time.com/2013/02/21/googles-chomebook-pixel-the-chromebook-g...
and I got nervous.
Status: you'll see in as we upstream the coreboot that we can turn on graphics in coreboot now without a vbios. The code is crude and I'm in the process of creating a replacement. The tool to create the real code is in the i915tool and is called gen915code.c. Note that it does lot of annotation, turning things like this: {W, 1, "", _PIPEACONF, 0x00000040, },
{W, 1, "", _PIPEACONF, (/* PIPECONF_FRAME_START_DELAY_MASK */0x0<<27)| PIPECONF_BPP_6 | PIPECONF_DITHER_TYPE_SP |0x00000
What this means is that moving to other laptops *may* be easier.
We've got kernel patches too, and the result is that we've (in an experiment) reduced boot time to a login prompt to less than 4 seconds (after firmware is finished).
My goal is to make that better, but we'll see. But we chopped a full 3 seconds off of boot.
I am sorry this i915tool is a mess. I really wish it were better. I offer it in the state it is because I'm hoping it can be used, but it's very experimental and represents a lot of lessons learned the hard way. Part of this mess is that my ideas about how to do the work have changed so much since I started it.
Here are docs, which are also not very good, sorry! https://docs.google.com/document/d/1g8FMob25VZYxbWri2iFB8YiSL8gwF9vKJH3HGxr0...
Questions to me. Hope that some part of this is useful.
nice! -- Christian Gmeiner, MSc