Support for Acer Aspire 3680?

[Daniel Levine]

Are Acer Aspire series laptops such as the 3680 currently supported by
OpenBIOS? As the 3680's BIOS is limited in functionality and very
buggy, I'm looking for alternatives to it, and Coreboot, which appears
largely Linux-centric, isn't looking so great. (I'm trying to get
FreeBSD running on the laptop, and being hampered by the buggy BIOS.)

As for the laptop's hardware:

- Northbridge is Intel 945GM. Is this supported?

- Southbridge is Intel ICH7. This I'm more concerned about, as
Coreboot support for it seems to be still in development. Is this
supported by OpenBIOS, or should I be looking at Coreboot snapshots
instead?

Thanks, and apologies if I've got the wrong mailing list - this looked
as good a place as any to ask end-user questions about OpenBIOS.

[Blue Swirl]

On 11/29/08, Daniel Levine  wrote:
> Are Acer Aspire series laptops such as the 3680 currently supported by
>  OpenBIOS? As the 3680's BIOS is limited in functionality and very
>  buggy, I'm looking for alternatives to it, and Coreboot, which appears
>  largely Linux-centric, isn't looking so great. (I'm trying to get
>  FreeBSD running on the laptop, and being hampered by the buggy BIOS.)

Coreboot has much better support for real hardware, especially for
x86/PC. Currently OpenBIOS is actively developed only for Sparc32/64
and PPC platforms, running on virtual Qemu hardware.

[Stefan Reinauer]

Daniel Levine wrote:
> Are Acer Aspire series laptops such as the 3680 currently supported by
> OpenBIOS? As the 3680's BIOS is limited in functionality and very
> buggy, I'm looking for alternatives to it, and Coreboot, which appears
> largely Linux-centric, isn't looking so great. (I'm trying to get
> FreeBSD running on the laptop, and being hampered by the buggy BIOS.)
>
> As for the laptop's hardware:
>
> Northbridge is Intel 945GM. Is this supported?
>
> Southbridge is Intel ICH7. This I'm more concerned about, as
>
> Coreboot support for it seems to be still in development. Is this
> supported by OpenBIOS, or should I be looking at Coreboot snapshots
> instead?

OpenBIOS on x86 is not a stand-alone bios/firmware. Instead it requires
a low-level firmware to do all the chipset initialization.
On x86 this job is more or less always done by coreboot. So, if an x86
based system is not supported by coreboot, it won't run
OpenBIOS.

i945+ICH7M support is quite fresh in coreboot. You will need to open
your laptop, make sure you have a (hardware) flash recovery method and
you will need to write a bunch of code for your specific laptop.

If that does not scare you, you can find support for doing this on the
coreboot mailing list.

Best regards,
Stefan