Hi George,
The chip is there and it was easy to find it, but it's a less common package. It is an 8 pin part but wider and closer to the surface than the SOIC8. I tried the Pomona clip and even if the pins would match after mounting the clip, it makes no electric contact to it due to the smaller leads, so Flashrom couldn't detect it.
The next step is to solder some wires and make it writable from outside using my RaspberryPi external flasher.
The rest of the hardware is quite well supported by coreboot. It is somehow similar to Roda rk9 (same CPU package, NB and SB) but with the rest of the chips(EC and company) similar to other Thinkpad laptops, so in theory a port should not be so hard.
Cristi