Hi, my understanding (sorry if wrong) is that it is not possible to run linuxbios/corebios on intel platforms, because of lack of documentation. i am wondering what are the problematic parts.. probably MCH controler DRAM init? CPU init (microcode, stepping,...)?.. this is sad, as i really want to be able to use corebios..
very recently i have been assigned to porting BIOSEs to our new hardware plaftorms. so i am working with amibios. it is partitionned into two major pieces: -bootblock -post/main bios
bootblock is a 64K segment, where the CPU is configured and MCH sdram controller is init (based on code provided by intel). then it branches to post for devices init, pci enum...
it must be doable technically, to keep the fast, tiny bootblock and jump to something like corebios . any comments? i don't know if this is the place to ask but is it possible from a legal standpoint to modify an amibios prom binary and just keep parts of it, in case i want to use this scheme in the products of the company i work for?
thanks eric
On Mon, 30 Jun 2008 11:45:00 +0200, "jf simon" yeticluns@gmail.com wrote:
Hi, my understanding (sorry if wrong) is that it is not possible to run linuxbios/corebios on intel platforms, because of lack of documentation. i am wondering what are the problematic parts.. probably MCH controler DRAM init? CPU init (microcode, stepping,...)?.. this is sad, as i really want to be able to use corebios..
very recently i have been assigned to porting BIOSEs to our new hardware plaftorms. so i am working with amibios. it is partitionned into two
major
pieces: -bootblock -post/main bios
bootblock is a 64K segment, where the CPU is configured and MCH sdram controller is init (based on code provided by intel). then it branches to post for devices init, pci enum...
it must be doable technically, to keep the fast, tiny bootblock and jump to something like corebios . any comments? i don't know if this is the place to ask but is it possible from a legal standpoint to modify an amibios prom binary and just keep parts of it,
in
case i want to use this scheme in the products of the company i work for?
Hello Eric, I don't know where you got your information, but coreboot is able to run on Intel platforms. We have quite a few Intel systems running coreboot with no problems. The only problem with Intel platforms is the lack of support from Intel. If the datasheet is publicly available, you can use that to port the board. All you have to do is find a currently supported board that is close and use that for your new base code, and modify it according to the datasheet. I don't really understand your question about mixing coreboot with amibios. I don't think that really is feasable or realistic. The only part you may want to use from amibios is the vga rom. Hope that helps.
Intel support is possible. Josh Harr once stated that if you can show intel that coreboot will sell 2k or more cpus for a given opportunity, they'll help you with coreboot.
So, at minimum, if you have a business case, you can get intel support for coreboot.
thanks
ron
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jf simon -
Joseph Smith -
ron minnich