Excerpts from Corey Osgood's message of Wed Apr 20 19:55:22 -0400 2011:
On Wed, Apr 20, 2011 at 9:07 AM, Philippe LeCavalier support@plecavalier.com wrote:
Excerpts from Stefan Reinauer's message of Tue Apr 19 21:30:35 -0400 2011:
- Philippe LeCavalier support@plecavalier.com [110419 20:22]:
[..]
If your BIOS works for you, you should consider keeping it.
Porting coreboot to a new mainboard is a significant effort and you will have to make sure you have ways to recover from failure (i.e. get your external flash writer and/or soldering iron ready)
hm. I see. I was hoping the worst case would be flashing it back to the original BIOS. A soldering gun is a bit extreme considering my current setup works just fine.
However, in some cases you can get to sub second firmware boot times with coreboot. And it is open source, so you can add or remove whatever feature you require or not.
Despite the aforementioned this is still somewhat appealing to me.
[..]
To ensure I fully comprehend the risk here...Backing up the BIOS isn't my insurance policy; I'd actually have to replace the chip? Once I've got a clear understanding of the worst-case scenario I'll feel stronger about making a decision.
Where this is a laptop, the flash chip will definitely be soldiered onto the motherboard. Also, you will definitely have an embedded controller (EC), and that will keep flashrom from working out of the box, so you'll need either an external flash programmer (most likely an SPI flash chip) or to do quite a bit of digging and legwork to figure out how to poke the embedded controller to allow access to the flash chip (and then remove the flash chip and put in a socket, or else hack together something to switch between two flash chips). Also, don't expect to find datasheets on the embedded controller, they're typically covered by some fairly restrictive NDAs.
The EC also will come into play during hardware init, so you'll also need to figure out how to initialize it. You may need to initialize it before you can even initialize the ram.
See also http://www.coreboot.org/Laptop
hm. This is likely a common occurrence, but this sounds to complex for me mostly because the system in question is a system I rely on for work. Maybe I'll grab an older system I don't rely on a see if I can find a well supported chipset to play with. I've got a few older desktop systems that might fit the bill a bit more. Thanks for all the insight from everyone that responded. Once I get a few minutes to myself I'll put together a system and try my luck with coreboot.