supported laptops

Hello, I'm very interested on flashing my laptop, even though the chipset/southbridge appear to be supported in version 2, I would really like to know if this can be done, being a laptop, it would be very difficult for me to recover it from a failed flash attempt. Thank You for your help and information. Alan

Step 1: 
I have a laptop Acer Aspire AS5515-5879, It lists a motherboard name of  “Acer Nile” made by Compal model number KAW60. It originally came with an AMD Athlon 64 2650E that I upgraded to an AMD Athlon 64 X2 5050E. The chipset lists as ATI RS690/RS690M, Southbridge is ATI SB600. It comes with embedded ATI Radeon X1200 graphics.

STEP 2:
lspci -tvnn output
-[0000:00]-+-00.0  ATI Technologies Inc RS690 Host Bridge [1002:7910] 
           +-01.0-[0000:01]----05.0  ATI Technologies Inc RS690M [Radeon X1200 Series] [1002:791f] 
           +-06.0-[0000:02-04]----00.0  Atheros Communications Inc. AR242x 802.11abg Wireless PCI Express Adapter [168c:001c] 
           +-07.0-[0000:05-07]----00.0  Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8101E/RTL8102E PCI Express Fast Ethernet controller [10ec:8136] 
           +-12.0  ATI Technologies Inc SB600 Non-Raid-5 SATA [1002:4380] 
           +-13.0  ATI Technologies Inc SB600 USB (OHCI0) [1002:4387] 
           +-13.1  ATI Technologies Inc SB600 USB (OHCI1) [1002:4388] 
           +-13.4  ATI Technologies Inc SB600 USB (OHCI4) [1002:438b] 
           +-13.5  ATI Technologies Inc SB600 USB Controller (EHCI) [1002:4386] 
           +-14.0  ATI Technologies Inc SBx00 SMBus Controller [1002:4385] 
           +-14.1  ATI Technologies Inc SB600 IDE [1002:438c] 
           +-14.2  ATI Technologies Inc SBx00 Azalia (Intel HDA) [1002:4383] 
           +-14.3  ATI Technologies Inc SB600 PCI to LPC Bridge [1002:438d] 
           +-14.4-[0000:08-0a]-- 
           +-18.0  Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] HyperTransport Technology Configuration [1022:1100] 
           +-18.1  Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Address Map [1022:1101] 
           +-18.2  Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] DRAM Controller [1022:1102] 
           -18.3  Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Miscellaneous Control [1022:1103]

STEP 3:
superiotool -dV does not report any i/o chip

STEP 4:
Unknown type device, flashrom -V  hangs  needing a hard power cycle.

STEP 5:
Unknown

STEP 6:
No further information available.

[Peter Stuge]

Hi Alan,

[e-mail] wrote:
> Hello, I'm very interested on flashing my laptop,

..
> The chipset lists as ATI RS690/RS690M, Southbridge is ATI SB600.

This combination is supported by coreboot. There is a lot of code and
it works well on at least a couple of boards.

..
> STEP 3:
> superiotool -dV does not report any i/o chip
>
> STEP 4:
> Unknown type device, flashrom -V  hangs  needing a hard power cycle.
>
> STEP 5:
> Unknown
>
> STEP 6:
> No further information available.

Now, the lack of information here suggests that you have some work to
do, to create a development environment for this system.

And yes, you will need to find a way to recover from images that
don't work. Presumably this has an SPI flash chip. You could go for
an SPI flash emulator, some developers are using the Dediprog SF-100
with success. You would de-solder the current flash chip, and solder
wires to the SF-100 instead.

So, the laptop could possibly be made to work with coreboot, but it
is nowhere near as simple as just flashing a new firmware. You will
need to dig in and do some development.

You could run into catastrophic trouble with the EC, but it could
also be simple to deal with. You would have to try, to know.

//Peter