Am 25.03.2014 18:44 schrieb mrnuke:
I like your attitude too. I've started developing a Candidacy page [1]. I won't start fiddling hardware or funds until a consensus is reached as to the best option.
There's an interesting trend with these ProBooks. In November, when I got my chromebook, there was only one ProBook with AMD CPU available IIRC. Now there are a number of such models. That may indicate we can expect those to be on the market for a while, or I'm just remembering wrong and those have less than a year of shelf life remaining.
Anyone has any experience with the AMD ProBooks? Are they built to last, or are they crap?
Alex
As a side note, should we publish a call for help to lwn.net, phoronix and other sites to have people run one of the mainboard info gathering scripts (e.g. https://gist.github.com/Thermionix/8933550 ) on all recent AMD-based laptops they encounter, and ask for PCB pictures as well in case someone has disassembled the hardware? That would at least allow us to get hardware info for the candidates without having to buy the hardware on speculative basis. For a volunteer effort, picking hardware with supported CPU/chipset is the only option, and making sure the hardware is something we either have code or datasheets for.
The big challence is not to put out the call for help, it's dealing with the responses in a meaningful way. The mailing list is not going to cut it, we may have to use a web form with upload capability. We could even reuse the upload forum of paste.flashrom.org if we need a simple file store (with protection against unauthorized downloads). Uploaded files need to be parsed and classified. The results (i.e. whether coreboot supports the CPU, chipset and other hardware) should be made available to the submitter and/or to the public. It's some work, but the gathered data would IMHO be worth it.
Thoughts?
Regards, Carl-Daniel