I have an old motherboard, maybe I should start whit it first. I am really interested in those things you cited, like electronics, low level programming and so on. I think I should get some items like soldering iron etc. The most critical question on my mind is I feel that there is no end for a chip design so you may have to do it every time when you see a new chip. But, anyway, I will try it, since I want to learn it a lot :)
On Tue, Jul 21, 2009 at 6:24 AM, Peter Stugepeter@stuge.se wrote:
Hi Ahmet,
ahmet alper parker wrote:
Ok, I feel mad enough :) Is there a documentation/info/video that describes what I should do?
An efficient firmware level developer has years of software and ideally also hardware education (autodidact, or otherwise) as well as development experience. That can't really be packaged in a video that can just be clicked on in a web browser.
There is however a lot of documentation available online, and of course the source code can be used to learn a lot!
There are several presentations about coreboot available online, but they are all somewhat introductory and overviewy, because it is difficult to go into all details in only 40 minutes.
The better way to start is typically from the other end - learn all you can about lowlevel PC programming in general, and then focus on coreboot. coreboot isn't a great place to learn everything you need. It can certainly be done, but it will take a very long time.
If you have already opened your laptop several times to do some hacking, and you figured out how to do it yourself, I think it could be really interesting to work on coreboot. You would learn about every single pin (there are a thousand or so) on the major chips in your laptop, you would get a soldering iron if you don't already have one and you would learn how to solder surface mount components on the laptop mainboard. You could also help yourself by learning about electronics, voltages and current, in order to turn your laptop (meant for users) into an embedded systems development board (good for firmware level development). This might mostly consist of mechanical (i.e. physical) hacks, to be able to run the system without the case, but that can be very tricky.
Also, one more comment, in a previous attempt, I used some tool to enable the virtualization technology of the cpu with hacking it without the own menu of the original bios. I hope this has no harm on bios, correct?
That's impossible to say without knowing exactly what the tool did.
I would say that if your system still starts and runs, and you notice no problems while running the system, then your BIOS is still OK.
//Peter