Hey Nico,
Thank you for the info this is what I was looking for before starting on what looks like it might have been a futile task (for myself). I am sure I can find other machines that work just as well for my workload. My goal is to find a board that is not yet supported by coreboot as I would very much like to get involved in development of coreboot and for me I very much need something hands on to learn.
Does there happen to be a list of vendors that are more friendly than Intel to work with? I'll keep looking around to see if I can find something that fits into my above criteria and isn't running the intel Nehalem/Westmere processors.
Thanks
On 2018-12-11 04:29, Nico Huber wrote:
Hello Ed,
I just started looking into adding support for the dell r610.
I really don't want to discourage you, but if I'm looking at the correct datasheet, this machine is using Nehalem/Westmere EP processors (e.g. Xeon X5550 etc.). If that is the case, this is no project suited for a coreboot beginner: It's unlikely that Intel would give out any useful documentation about these processors and there is no platform alike (i.e. with QPI) in coreboot. Reverse engineering is possible, but as a spare-time project this could take years.
Maybe you can find another system that fits your workloads and already has some coreboot chipset support. Though, on the Intel server front it's not looking very good. Intel fought hard to keep these platforms coreboot free.
Nico