* Vikram Narayanan vikram186@gmail.com [110517 16:50]:
On Tue, May 17, 2011 at 4:06 PM, Anders Jenbo anders@jenbo.dk wrote:
Den 17-05-2011 10:41, Андрей Клаус skrev:
Hello everybody,
I'm thinking about porting coreboot to my motherboard (epox 9NPA3I / 9NPA3J / 9NPAJ-3 / 9NPA3 Ultra Series). My chipset (CK804) and my superio (F71872F/FG) are in supported list. According to this page (http://www.coreboot.org/Support) port "might be easy" (exactly: "If you find those in our list of Supported Chipsets and Devices a port might be easy").
I need roughly estimation for "easy" to decide is it possible for me to port coreboot or not (in time-consuming terms). So, is "easy" up to 8 hours for coreboot expert, or is it up to 40 hours for coreboot expert? Will be great if you could give me estimation for 'worst' and 'best' variant.
Thank you very much, Andrey
It took me less then 8 hours to make my first port, and I'm not even a C programmer, mine was a best case senario as there was a sibling board already ported. I have also ported some where just the component where supported, that didn't take to long either, probably 7-10 hours.
Working on a board where only legacy code and docs are available I have probably spend around 12 hours to get to ram init.
I think the key to sussess is to have an easy way to reflash the bios when your image failes.
Seems quite inspirational to the people who wanted to port for new boards. @ Stefan: Can you please share your opinions on this?
Those values vary widely on the quality of the port, the number of features and the amount of testing you put into this. Getting an OS booted on a new mainboard can be a thing of 15 minutes, if you are lucky and just copy an existing mainboard and maybe change the SuperI/O.
However, doing a port to a new board is usually a lot more than that.
There are many board ports in coreboots tree these days, and frankly, not all of them are production level quality and/or tested on a large number of different configurations. Something you whip up in a dat most certainly is not. It might still be a great port and do everything the author wanted it to do.
Stefan