Hello!
I've been attempting to flash Coreboot to a recently acquired Acer Chromebook CP713-3W with the hope of eventually being able to boot from a USB drive and install some variety of linux.
Currently my system is only limitedly responsive when booting, so I acquired a flash programmer to try and program the rom chip directly. When attempting to do this (and also while building the rom from the google source code) I noticed a few things that seemed to complicate the flashing process.
The only chip I have identified so far as a rom chip is 1MB in size (Winbond W25Q80DVSNIG). I was unable to read the intel firmware descriptor or a layout file from it when attached with the usb programmer. When using the chromium coreboot sources, selecting the voxel mainboard also automatically selected the layout file associated with the volteer mainboards. Because this layout file was for a 32MB chip, I was unable to use it to build the chip, but because I didn't have a layout file, I didn't know what to set the size of the CBFS filesystem to be in the build config. I attempted several guessed sizes to just see if I could get a file to build, but no attempted size ended up being able to even produce a rom image.
I now have some questions.
1. Am I even looking at the right chip? Is there a different 32MB Rom that I should be flashing to? Does the chromebook firmware live on the harddrive somehow (I find this unlikely because the hard drive is replaceable, but I wanted to mention the possibility)? If it's not the bios chip, then what is it?
2. If this is the right chip, how do I reduce the size of the payload and/or determine the appropriate size of the CBFS filesystem in order to create a rom that I could flash? Is it feasible/would it be better to get a 32MB rom chip, flash it with the built image from chromium coreboot and the volteer layout file, and replace the current chip with it?
3. What sort of expectations should I have for the current status of coreboot on this mainboard (either from the coreboot or chromium repositories)? What additional work should I expect to have to do if I want to be able to e. g. boot from a linux flash drive?
Please let me know if there's more information I can provide that would be useful, if there's a better place for me to ask these questions, or if there are resources that can help guide me towards answering these questions for myself.
Matthew Kunjummen