[OpenBIOS] Support for Acer Aspire 3680?

[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