On 29.03.19 19:08, Rafael Send wrote:
> Hi Nico-
> Can you clarify what you mean by coreboot on x86 is special?

on x86, there are two ways to access a SPI flash chip: 1. you can ask
the SPI controller via a register based interface to access the flash
chip. 2. by default, the flash chip contents of the BIOS region* of
the flash chip is memory mapped (i.e. you can read from it just like
you read from RAM).

1. may support >16MiB chips/regions.

2. is usually limited to 8MiB or 16MiB depending on the chipset. I
would guess 16MiB in your case, but I can't promise.

2. is used by coreboot. However, with some additional code you can
also use 1.

*Intel shares the flash chip with other chipset components, e.g.
ME firmware.

>
> Does that mean even if 3-byte addresses are supported (which would allow
> addressing more than 128Mb / 16MiB of memory), it specifically doesn't work
> on x86?

No. The x86 thing is just a current software limitation that can be
lifted. But still, there may be chips (e.g. EC) between the flash and
the Intel chipset that may have their own limits.

>
> I'm looking at the coreboot port that was done for the Thinkpad X210, which
> is a Chinese custom motherboard that updates the X201 form factor with an
> i7-8650U / i7-8550u / i5-8250U CPU, and just for the hell of it I'm
> wondering what the largest piece of BIOS memory is I can get on there.
> Hardware-wise, I can get up to 512Mb / 64MiB into the chip form factor. If
> we can address it, that opens up interesting possibilities for embedding
> full OS distributions there (such as my previous question about TinyCore).

The chipset supports up to two chips of 64MiB each. But I don't know if
the flash is directly connected.

In case of a full OS in flash, I would suggest a SPI driver in the OS
kernel, anyway. Otherwise, you'd have to let coreboot load a lot of data
from flash at once and that would slow it down (but that doesn't have to
be a concern).

Nico