On Fri, Apr 18, 2008 at 3:09 PM, Mart Raudsepp mart.raudsepp@artecdesign.ee wrote:
With the help of the LPC dongle for instance? I typically rarely care about what is on the onboard flash - I only burn something different on there for convenience if I need to boot the same firmware many times in a row, which doesn't happen exactly often during coreboot testing. Other times, just booting off the dongle.
I would feel much more comfortable having something that does not require cracking the case open. how do we do that? I think etherboot more and more is the answer. Even though I don't really like it.
I've been also able to get the dongle working with just having the small left side of the ThinCan removed, but I don't deal with boards that are in cases not that often either. The LPC connection is on the very side, so the cable fits in there with some twisting, but that's probably more risky than having a bare mainboard, unless you have a header soldered on the LPC connection, in which case I'm not sure if the ribbon cable can be attached without removing the top of the case. Btw, if the top part of the case is removed, you just need to pay attention to the bottom - the front side supporting the front side of the board is gone then and could shortcircuit things from the bottom, so need a paper between the case and board or something like that if don't want to remove the whole case.
Without the dongle, you obviously need a way to flash the onboard ROM (which could wear out with lots of work), and flashrom since rev3110 or so should work great for that. So whatever means you can do to get into a Linux system that just has msr/mem support and flashrom, be it over etherboot, included in the dongle in 4MB memory mode (v3 got a patch committed recently to enable that), residing in the NAND flash, or whatever else can be conceived and booted with whatever onboard ROM is burnt in before reflashing :)
Regards, Mart Raudsepp Artec Design LLC
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Mart Raudsepp