Legacy OS Support

[Mason McAlister]

hello!
any idea when Legacy OS/BIOS support is coming to Coreboot?
i'd like to be able to boot legacy OSes (such as Windows 7 and below) on my
chromebook, which is using MrChromebox's fork of Coreboot.
i'm not "expecting" Legacy OS/BIOS support, UEFI is good enough, i think
it'd just be cool if i could get windows XP or windows 7 on a chromebook.

cheers!
-Mason

[Peter Stuge]

Mason McAlister wrote:
> any idea when Legacy OS/BIOS support is coming to Coreboot?

To coreboot itself probably never but you can use SeaBIOS as payload
to get a BIOS environment that will boot Windows, if the ACPI tables
created/delivered by coreboot for the mainboard are correct.
> it'd just be cool if i could get windows XP or windows 7 on a chromebook.

Should work as long as ACPI tables are correct, I would expect
Chromebooks to have fairly good ones.

//Peter

[Matt DeVillier]

hi Mason,

I'm a bit confused here - you're not going to be able to boot any OS which
requires legacy BIOS using my MrChromebox (UEFI) firmware images. But even
if you could, older OSes like Windows XP/7 don't have drivers to support
the newer hardware platform used on your Chromebook, to say nothing for the
peripherals like the touchpad which require custom drivers that simply
don't exist for older versions of Windows.

You're also unlikely to be able to run WinXP/7 even using a custom
coreboot+SeaBIOS firmware image, given that older versions of Windows were
pretty bad about following the ACPI spec, and/or required lots of firmware
workarounds for Windows quirks. And even if you could boot, you're going to
run into the driver issues as mentioned above.

Virtual machines exist for a reason, and running WinXP/7 in a VM from a
Linux host is going to be the best and easiest solution here.

cheers,
Matt / MrChromebox

On Wed, Jun 28, 2023 at 1:37 PM Peter Stuge  wrote:
> Mason McAlister wrote:
> > any idea when Legacy OS/BIOS support is coming to Coreboot?
>
> To coreboot itself probably never but you can use SeaBIOS as payload
> to get a BIOS environment that will boot Windows, if the ACPI tables
> created/delivered by coreboot for the mainboard are correct.
> > it'd just be cool if i could get windows XP or windows 7 on a chromebook.
>
> Should work as long as ACPI tables are correct, I would expect
> Chromebooks to have fairly good ones.
>
> //Peter
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