Hi Daniel,
On 04.12.2008 21:17, Daniel Levine wrote:
My Aspire 3680 has a bad BIOS, is no longer under warranty, and is already leaning towards obsolescence a year and a half after its purchase; I'm wondering if Coreboot might work on it.
The output of lspci follows: [...] How well are 945GM and 82801G supported? Could I actually have Coreboot working on this machine, or would I only succeed in bricking it? Would I need custom code for the laptop?
That depends a lot on the embedded controller in your laptop. Unfortunately, finding the embedded controller chip by software is next to impossible because almost all embedded controller data sheets are under NDA or totally unavailable. That's also the biggest reason why coreboot focuses on desktop, server and embedded boards. Usually none of those boards need or have an embedded controller, so we can circumvent the associated headache.
Also, for whatever it's worth - can Coreboot load GNU GRUB (or FreeBSD's BTX bootloader) instead of a Linux kernel?
It can work with GRUB2, but I have no idea about BTX loading. Most bootloaders try to use BIOS interrupt services and for that you need to load SeaBIOS.
Regards, Carl-Daniel