[coreboot] Coreboot on the Supermicro H8SCM-F

[Taiidan at gmx.com]

On 04/27/2017 12:30 AM, Patrick 'P. J.' McDermott wrote:

> On 2017-04-26 at 15:25, Rene Shuster wrote:
>> Maybe even FSF-endorsed. Great news! Spread the news.
> The H8SCM is a nice find, but unfortunately probably not eligible for
> FSF certification.
>
> The board has an old AGP-based Matrox G200eW GPU.  In addition to having
> a non-free VBIOS [1], the GPU has a "WARP Engine" – a RISC coprocessor
> core with non-free microcode (loaded by Linux [2]) to do triangle setup
> operations [3].
>
> So, a couple of blobs that would be rather non-trivial to reverse
> engineer and replace.  The board could surely run headless without them,
> but the FSF most likely wouldn't certify it since users could be tempted
> to load the blobs to get video output and graphics acceleration.
>
> [1]:https://www.coreboot.org/Board:supermicro/h8scm#Extract_VGA_BIOS
> [2]:https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/drivers/gpu/drm/mga/mga_warp.c
> [3]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrox_G200
Yeah.
AGP? I had thought it was PCI behind a PCI-e>PCI bridge

What could be nice is replacing the crappy matrox chip with another 
better one that is compatible, does anyone know if that is possible? is 
it a standard bga or what not?

The only issues with the board I have seen is the lack of PCI-e lanes on 
the SR5650, but for $30 you really can't go wrong.
Configs:
x16 and x4, x16 and x8 physical.
x8, x8 and x4 - x16, x8 and x8 physical.


When I get the cash I will get one of the latest and greatest 2014 G34 
boards from supermicro and see about porting that as they have a dual 
northbridge layout there is plenty of PCI-e lanes, for instance the 
H8QG7-iLN4F is the best G34 board.