Hello all, I would like to present here a brief report of my first tests with coreboot on the G505s laptop. First of all I would like to thank Zaolin for his enormous help (which went even to hw hacking.. ;-)) and Paul Kocialkowski for his advices.
In a nutshell : it MOSTLY works with a recent release of coreboot => linux (ubuntu 14.04) correctly boots in graphical mode and with networking support.
Test setup : - Coreboot release : commit 439a527014fa0cb3e4ef60ba59e5c57c737b4444 (head of 4.2 branch ?) - Install method : external programmer (flashrom on beagleboard); - OS : Ubuntu Trusty Tahr 14.04LTS
Problems: -1) On the HW side : like with (almost) every laptop it is better to have an interface for external flashing. But it is difficult to access the winbond flash on the MB to solder wires for the flashing connecter : practically the laptop has to be (almost) completely disassembled and the MB extracted; -2) The video bios binary blob has to be extracted from the original bios and added to the coreboot image. The method based on the unpacking of the original uefi bios doesn't work (and also the id of the video device doesn't match!!..) so the VBIOS image has to be dumped from /sys/devices/<path_to_vga_device>/rom; -3) The USB3 does NOT work : the 3rdparty xhci blob (${COREBOOT}/3rdparty/blobs/southbridge/amd/hudson/xhci.bin) is not correct!.. PLEASE HELP : can someone give me a tip or advice, how to extract this blob (from uefi image or /sys/<whatever..>)? -4) The "internal" flashing method does NOT work : even after booting with coreboot and "requesting a brick", flashrom says something like "read/write methods not implemented" even after detencting the flash chip. (I was using the "flashrom" of the ubuntu distrib..)
I will fix the wiki page for this laptop after doing some additional tests.
Best regards, Florentin