Re: [coreboot] Newbie question about motherboard support

(I do not believe it does, but wait for a more experienced person to reply.)

Information for you as a new member of the community:
The past 5 years intel (and AMD FM2/AM4) platforms are generally pretty 
locked down, it is very difficult to install blob free or even semi-open 
firmware replacement on them even if you could somehow get the 
documentation. (which they will never give a mere mortal like us) and 
the newer intel systems have something called "Boot Guard" which is a 
CPU enforced code signing mechanism to prohibit the installation of open 
source firmware entirely. You shouldn't buy intel if you want anything 
even somewhat libre friendly (at least AMD gives lip service to foss)
https://www.coreboot.org/Binary_situation
https://libreboot.org/ (more info on foss compat here, just ignore the 
politics)

Anyone who says they have a post 775/771 system that is 100% blob free 
open source is lying, that includes the purism scammers.
At this point for new systems you have select ARM and OpenPOWER systems 
(like the Raptor TALOS and the Tyan Palmetto, both HPC 
workstations/servers) I believe there are a few 100% FOSS laptops out 
there that aren't listed on the coreboot site but my age betrays me and 
I am forgetting what they are called. (I say again purism is a scam, do 
not buy from them.)
On 10/31/2016 06:30 PM, Vasiliy Tolstov wrote:
> Hi, I have acer es1-131 that as I see like some Google Chromebooks, it
> motherboard based on intel braswell, and as I found support for this soc
> added by intel.
> Does current coreboot master support my motherboard and laptop?
>
> In wiki I can't find many braswell supported platforms and acer in vendor
> of laptop too (only Chromebooks).

Newbie question about motherboard support

[Julius Werner]

> I believe there are a few 100% FOSS laptops out there that aren't listed on
> the coreboot site but my age betrays me and I am forgetting what they are
> called. (I say again purism is a scam, do not buy from them.)

All Chromebooks based on Nvidia and Rockchip SoCs are 100% FOSS as far
as firmware goes (graphics acceleration is a different story, but you
can run them with software rendering). (Mediatek Chromebooks are 99.9%
FOSS, they just have a tiny power management controller with openly
available binary firmware.)

As for OP's question, coreboot can not just support a random
motherboard out of the box, you will always need code for it. You
might be able to write it yourself if you know (or are willing to
figure out) enough about how it's laid out. The existing Braswell code
will certainly provide you a good stepping stone... board support is
usually a tiny amount of work compared to SoC support.

I don't know enough about Intel to tell you whether your board is
using BootGuard or how you would find that out, though. If it does,
you're probably out of luck. (If it doesn't, it's true that you still
need blobs... but you can usually extract these from your vendor
firmware and work them into a coreboot image.)