Hi Nico- Can you clarify what you mean by coreboot on x86 is special?
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?
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).
Gruß, R
On Fri, Mar 29, 2019 at 10:10 AM Nico Huber nico.h@gmx.de wrote:
Hello Rafael,
On 28.03.19 17:12, Rafael Send wrote:
Where would I generally find information about what controls the flash
chip?
in the datasheet of the chip that is connected to the BIOS flash. What chip that is, is not always easy to answer. If you don't have access to the board's schematics, visual inspection might help.
What Peter told us, btw., applies only to x86 platforms. If you target x86, coreboot support for more than 16MiB will be hard, because that is the limit what is memory mapped. To access more than 16MiB on x86, you'd need a SPI driver (which coreboot has) and use that to access files (which is the harder part, because coreboot on x86 is special).
Please tell us more about your target hardware and use case. Usually, you don't need that much flash for coreboot. So there may be other options to consider (e.g. a SPI driver in your payload).
Nico