[coreboot] A new, modern coreboot long-term support laptop

David Hendricks dhendrix at google.com
Tue Mar 25 21:26:21 CET 2014


On Tue, Mar 25, 2014 at 12:17 PM, mrnuke <mr.nuke.me at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tuesday, March 25, 2014 12:03:28 PM David Hendricks wrote:
> > On Tue, Mar 25, 2014 at 10:57 AM, mrnuke <mr.nuke.me at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > On Tuesday, March 25, 2014 10:53:51 AM ron minnich wrote:
> > > > Just one thing. Don't underestimate just how miserable the EC can
> make
> > > > your life. I place a high premium on systems with an open EC. Just be
> > > > careful there.
> > >
> > > Can you tell us more about the Samsung Chromebook 2?
> >
> > What do you want to know? It's been announced, the specs are out, the
> > firmware code is out in the open (it ships with u-boot), and we even have
> > some code upstream for it in coreboot that could be polished up. There's
> > the usual masked ROM in addition to the 8KB BL0 blob, but everything else
> > is open including the EC firmware.
> >
> I'm assuming BLO is not persistent.
>

It's been a while since I've looked closely at it, but I think it does
remain persistent in the resume path.


> > It's a nice laptop that is probably already a good candidate for RYF.
> I'll
> > leave subjective analysis as an exercise for the reader.
>
> Teardown pictures?


That ought to show up on chromium.org in the near future. I'm sure other
sites will have teardown pics as well once the device makes it out to more
reviewers and is available for sale.


> Construction quality?


Subjective. IMO it's nice.


> Shelf life?


Subjective according to the vendor. The original Samsung Chromebook is
still readily available after over a year and a half, but it's also been a
bestseller for an incredibly long time. If the newer model is successful I
suspect it will remain on shelves for a while too.


> Performance numbers?


Subjective, depending on what you want to do. Third-party websites ought to
have plenty of benchmarks you can refer to.


> As far as RYF, it's by far the best candidate with the least amount of work
> involved.


>From a firmware perspective, I think that's a fair statement. It only
matters though if folks are comfortable with the limitations of where the
ARM world seems is with regard to booting different OSes and kernels. For
that reason I was kind of hoping for an x86 platform (likely AMD based)
since I think most folks will find it easiest to boot their favorite distro
or non-Linux OS. But either way is cool.

-- 
David Hendricks (dhendrix)
Systems Software Engineer, Google Inc.
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