Coreboot + SeaBIOS on GA-M52S-S3P?

[Ivan Shmakov]

I wonder, did anyone try Coreboot and SeaBIOS on Gigabyte's
    GA-M52S-S3P?

I'm mainly interested in booting Linux 2.6-based GNU system via
    GRUB 2 from a SATA HDD (with GPT), but I'd like to have other
    boot devices (floppy and DVD drives, USB Flash) and systems
    supported as well.

One more issue is that the BIOS IC (labelled MX 25L4005AM2C) is
    soldered to the board.  I wonder, what'd be the recovery
    procedure should the newly uploaded firmware fail to boot?

TIA.

The backstory is as follows.  Suddenly, the vendor's BIOS has
    decided that it needs a backup.  Without hesitation, it choose one
    of the HDD's attached, and wrote its copy there, reserving some 2113
    sectors at its tail as a “Host Protected Area” (HPA.)  Effectively,
    this has invalidated the drive's GPT, rendering the system
    unbootable.  Seemingly, no data (apart from the backup GPT) was
    lost, but I'd like to avoid the surprises like this in the future.

As I was unable to find the relevant BIOS configuration software for
    AwardBIOS, I'm now looking if I should abandon such a misbehaved
    variety of proprietary firmware completely for something free.

[Marc Jones]

On Tue, Feb 7, 2012 at 9:27 AM, Ivan Shmakov  wrote:
> I wonder, did anyone try Coreboot and SeaBIOS on Gigabyte's
>        GA-M52S-S3P?

The nvidia chipset is the biggest challenge. I don't know how close it
is to the nvida support in coreboot.
> I'm mainly interested in booting Linux 2.6-based GNU system via
>        GRUB 2 from a SATA HDD (with GPT), but I'd like to have other
>        boot devices (floppy and DVD drives, USB Flash) and systems
>        supported as well.

This is a typical coreboot + seabios solution.
> One more issue is that the BIOS IC (labelled MX 25L4005AM2C) is
>        soldered to the board.  I wonder, what'd be the recovery
>        procedure should the newly uploaded firmware fail to boot?

There are a number of ways to handle recovery. Please see this page
for more info:
http://www.coreboot.org/Developer_Manual/Tools#External_EPROM.2FFlash_progra...

Marc
> TIA.
>
> The backstory is as follows.  Suddenly, the vendor's BIOS has
>    decided that it needs a backup.  Without hesitation, it choose one
>    of the HDD's attached, and wrote its copy there, reserving some 2113
>    sectors at its tail as a “Host Protected Area” (HPA.)  Effectively,
>    this has invalidated the drive's GPT, rendering the system
>    unbootable.  Seemingly, no data (apart from the backup GPT) was
>    lost, but I'd like to avoid the surprises like this in the future.
>
> As I was unable to find the relevant BIOS configuration software for
>    AwardBIOS, I'm now looking if I should abandon such a misbehaved
>    variety of proprietary firmware completely for something free.