Am 11.07.2012 00:11 schrieb Jason_Vannest@abercrombie.com:
Sorry if this is a flashrom noob question. But I want to make sure that I understand correctly what your saying.
The question is valid.
It sounds like this Renesas H8S2116 controller is something that nobody on the flashrom dev team has worked on yet?
I think a few of us have already worked with Renesas H8 series controllers, so at least in theory this sounds doable.
From reading your very fine and very detailed web site (congrats on that BTW), specifically the section on adding support for laptops " http://www.flashrom.org/Laptops" it sounds like a little bit of a challenge to add support for a new chipset like this? Is that a correct assumption on my part?
Yes and no. It's a bit more complicated. If the Renesas H8S2116 is between the southbridge and the flash chip, adding flashrom support for the SurePOS might be a bit of a challenge. If the Renesas controller is not in that particular data path, there's a good chance we can simply ignore it. The unsupported chipset we were talking about is the VIA VT8251, and it seems we might already have code for it, we're just waiting for the matching VIA datasheet to confirm this.
We've spoken with IBM and of course all of their current stuff is DOS based / bootable from USB key. Of course for a fee they would be willing to help us out and develop a Linux based program to update the BIOS.....
It might be helpful for us if IBM can answer some questions about the hardware, but that's not a hard requirement. We have some quite sharp scalpels for analyzing hardware and software.
Does anyone have thoughts on how much time and effort it would take to do this? IBM is hardly ever the cheapest solution, so I'm guessing we would more likely find a more reasonable price from the Open Source community....
I'd venture a guess that we can do this before IBM can even give you a quote. That said, all of us have day jobs or study somewhere and we work on flashrom in our spare time. We're in the process of setting up a flashrom nonprofit, so besides the option of paying one of our developers there hopefully will be the option of making a tax-deductible contribution to our nonprofit.
We're happy to help you solve this challenge. If you have any further questions, just ask.
Regards, Carl-Daniel
I'd venture a guess that we can do this before IBM can even give you a quote.
What kind of information would you want? I have pretty solid connections with IBM I may be able to get questions answered about this.
Jason
-
Carl-Daniel Hailfinger -
Jason_Vannest＠abercrombie.com