Attention is currently required from: Felix Singer, Nico Huber, Angel Pons, Michael Niewöhner.
1 comment:
Patchset:
The IT8987E and IT5570E/IT5576E are a bit special. The reason for this is, that it has internal flash (called eflash) and supports external flash as well. One example where this gets used is the Clevo L140CU/L140MU (PCZ Lafité Pro 14" / Tuxedo Infinitybook S14 V5 / SCHENKER VIA 14 / ...), where some sort of mirroring between these two flashes is happening.
Do you have any idea, if we need to take special care of that mirroring mechanism or if it's handled by the ec firmware?
During the development I noticed that even after a failed write/update, the laptop always booted up, so I believe there is a mirroring in place. it may be related to the autoload option which this patch introduces. The autoload feature patches the firmware file and searches for a special sequence of bytes 0xa5/0x5a and changes two bytes in the sequence to indicate the autoload action to the EC. It looks like the EC check the external flash if it is valid and only then uses its firmware.
Summing it up no matter what I did wrong, the EC always could boot up and everything worked, so it is safe to think it is handled by the EC firmware. Now that the implementation is complete AND WORKING I may experiment with the autoload options (currently tested the NOACTION and DISABLE options).
> Unfortunately, that mechanism is not documented at all in the regular EC's datasheet(s). The only thing I know is that pin GPG2 acts as strap for preventing that mirroring (verified by asking ITE, but got no mirroring datasheet b/c it requires NDA). If you have access to ITE ec source (e.g. IT8987E), look out for `SPI_MIRROR_MODE` (GPG2 strap) and `SUPPORT_MIRROR_ONCE`.
I don't have access to the code. As mentioned earlier, I have only got EFI binaries and firmware update images from IBV to work on.
To view, visit change 55715. To unsubscribe, or for help writing mail filters, visit settings.