Gotta look for the next target after Asus P2B family and i440BX

[Keith Hui]

Hi guys,

You'll know me as one of the driving forces keeping our i440BX port alive.
I did see the two latest patches trying to modernize it and I swear I'll
get to it soon, because to be honest, that P2B-LS board has a special place
in my mind and is not going away, although it is not seeing much use
anymore in practice, which brings me to my next step and question.

I have three more modern boards (read: 2012 and they share the same 16GB
pair of DDR3L memory modules) with cousins already in the tree but not the
exact model. I do know I need to get some info in, but I want to get a take
on which one will have the best chance to get a working port first:

Lenovo ThinkPad X230 Tablet. This is now my daily machine. Due to some
snafu on my part I bought a second unit with only Wacom pen but no touch.
The non-tablet X230 is in the tree and there were some notes on tablet
hardware. I need to buy a test clip to access the flash chip. Now I wonder
if this guy is "already" supported.

Asus M4A785TD-M EVO. AM3, family 10h, closest cousin was m4a785t-m, but I
don't know where it went now.

Asus P8Z77-M. Closest cousin is p8z77-m_pro. Mine is not pro, but I don't
know off my head what the difference is. And I get to deal with ME.


More info once I get back to my desktop.
Keith

[Arthur Heymans]

Keith Hui <[e-mail]> writes:
> Hi guys,
>
> You'll know me as one of the driving forces keeping our i440BX port alive. I did see the two latest patches trying to modernize it and I swear I'll get to it soon, because to be honest, that P2B-LS board has a
> special place in my mind and is not going away, although it is not seeing much use anymore in practice, which brings me to my next step and question.

Thanks for that.
The C_ENVIRONMENT_BOOTBLOCK for i440BX has been merged.
The following patches are still pending:
https://review.coreboot.org/c/coreboot/+/36775/ (i440bx console in bootblock)
https://review.coreboot.org/c/coreboot/+/37164/ (i440bx run romstage cached)
> Lenovo ThinkPad X230 Tablet. This is now my daily machine. Due to some snafu on my part I bought a second unit with only Wacom pen but no touch. The non-tablet X230 is in the tree and there were
> some notes on tablet hardware. I need to buy a test clip to access the flash chip. Now I wonder if this guy is "already" supported.

It looks like the tablet variant is not explicitly supported. It
probably boots with a x230 build, but I suspect there is not support for
the wacom digitizer.
> Asus M4A785TD-M EVO. AM3, family 10h, closest cousin was m4a785t-m, but I don't know where it went now.

AMDFAM10 support was dropped after the 4.11 release. It lives on in the
4.11 branch.
> Asus P8Z77-M. Closest cousin is p8z77-m_pro. Mine is not pro, but I don't know off my head what the difference is. And I get to deal with ME.

Best way to deal with ME is to not deal with it at all and just flash
the BIOS region ;). Some possible differences are enabled/disabled pci
devices and gpio's. You should be able to add the board as a variant.

Kind regards

-- 
==============
Arthur Heymans