Hi,
On 07.04.2010 12:36, secretocean@gmx.de wrote:
oh shit, I thought it would be sufficient to rewrite the flash chip on the board by flashrom! Why this effort?
Stefan's description was about the easy and optimal way to get coreboot running. Depending on the embedded controller (EC) on your board, it is easily possible you will spend a few weeks or even months full-time to have coreboot working completely on your laptop.
Why is it such a big effort to port coreboot to a new board, especially a laptop? - An OS can simply probe for hardware and load the correct driver. coreboot can't do that because some of the hardware has to be initialized blindly (probing is impossible). - Many board specific settings are not stored in the hardware and there is no way to determine them from software. The firmware (coreboot/BIOS) has to know them, or RAM/interrupts/DMA/... will not work. An OS retrieves these settings from the firmware. - For some of the hardware on laptops (usually the EC) there is no documentation at all, so you can either leave the EC (which has its own firmware) alone and try to reverse engineer the communication protocol between EC and main CPU which will take weeks or months, or you can write your own EC firmware which will take months with docs or years without docs. - It is not unusual to need a few dozen tries before coreboot runs well enough on a board that you can reflash in-system.
Regards, Carl-Daniel