- Must itake out the motherboard completely of the laptop?
NS50MU doesn't need to be removed from the chassis. If you look at System76 tech docs [1], the flash chip (U12) is located above the left RAM slot.
Back to your Clevo devices, obviously you can just copy System76' choice of payload. I assume (not sure though) they use TianoCore. But I can't tell if that is what your customers expect.
We use our own fork of TianoCore, but I've tested other boards that I have at least boot using the payload provided by coreboot.
The good news for your Clevo devices is that this part is (almost) already done by System76 (assuming they use identical hardware).
The darp7 is based on NS50MU, so any potential differences would hopefully be limited to factory options Clevo provides.
*But* this is a TGL board, and we have several patches applied in addition to the mainboard code to make it work (e.g., CB:50597 and CB:50598, among other without upstream MRs yet). And I don't have any boards with me to test with.
However, System76 also uses their own EC firmware which coreboot needs to be compatible to. And its interface is unlikely to be compa- tible with Clevo's EC firmware.
Yep. There were a few boards where coreboot + ITE's EC firmware worked, but many won't boot due to missing communication between the BIOS and EC. The EC RAM space was compatible with ITE's firmware, but going forward that won't necessarily be true (CB:49129).
I have no idea how much trouble it is to replace the EC firmware.
Not much trouble once you have the hardware. We use a Mega2560 to flash the EC over the keyboard port [2], which has worked for all our boards so far.
[1]: https://tech-docs.system76.com/models/darp7/internal-overview.html [2]: https://github.com/system76/ec/blob/master/doc/flashing.md#external-programm...
-- Tim Crawford System76 Kernel Engineer tcrawford@system76.com