[flashrom] IBM SurePOS 700 4800-783 support

Carl-Daniel Hailfinger c-d.hailfinger.devel.2006 at gmx.net
Wed Jul 11 01:32:00 CEST 2012


Am 11.07.2012 00:11 schrieb Jason_Vannest at 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

-- 
http://www.hailfinger.org/





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