Am Freitag, den 06.12.2013, 20:05 -0600 schrieb Jeremy White:
If I were to change the second paragraph as follows:
If your board is not already supported, it will likely take you years of work to port coreboot to operate correctly on it.
"unless you have experience with firmware level C development and good knowledge of the x86 architecture."
With the chipset supported, experience and a bit of luck, a port can happen in a week (but these constraints are pretty nasty in themselves). Our problem is that there is no simple answer. I guess Peter prefers caution (to put it mildly), because a more nuanced answer is usually interpreted way too optimistically.
And then change the final paragraph to read: Usually in less than a day, someone will respond on the mailing list, most often with bad news. However, it is possible that your board is supported, or that support is under development, so it won't hurt to ask.
"most often with bad news" is a good idea. Thanks for the suggestion.
To look a bit closer at the device you proposed: The processor and chipset might actually be supported in coreboot, when using binary only components, at least their families are. The bad thing is that we even couldn't work around minor issues because the initialization code is binary only, and the datasheets we can access are also spotty. Intel isn't exactly cooperative in the firmware space, and so that's all we can work with these days. You'd have better luck with AMD setups. It's still hard, but at least we have the code and datasheets.
If the BRIX uses some embedded controller, then all bets are off, since it might just work, or it might require lots of code talking to an unknown interface. That's a piece of information we can usually only get from mainboard pictures, since these chips rarely show up in (consumer facing) data sheets.
Patrick