[coreboot] Newbie question about motherboard support

Julius Werner jwerner at chromium.org
Thu Nov 3 19:24:31 CET 2016


> I believe there are a few 100% FOSS laptops out there that aren't listed on
> the coreboot site but my age betrays me and I am forgetting what they are
> called. (I say again purism is a scam, do not buy from them.)

All Chromebooks based on Nvidia and Rockchip SoCs are 100% FOSS as far
as firmware goes (graphics acceleration is a different story, but you
can run them with software rendering). (Mediatek Chromebooks are 99.9%
FOSS, they just have a tiny power management controller with openly
available binary firmware.)

As for OP's question, coreboot can not just support a random
motherboard out of the box, you will always need code for it. You
might be able to write it yourself if you know (or are willing to
figure out) enough about how it's laid out. The existing Braswell code
will certainly provide you a good stepping stone... board support is
usually a tiny amount of work compared to SoC support.

I don't know enough about Intel to tell you whether your board is
using BootGuard or how you would find that out, though. If it does,
you're probably out of luck. (If it doesn't, it's true that you still
need blobs... but you can usually extract these from your vendor
firmware and work them into a coreboot image.)



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