News from coreboot world
firmware
GSoC 2011: midterm report under panic
0223 days
Well my progress is not so shiny as other students. Looks like I overestimated my capabilities in my project proposal. I ended up with long exam session, lurking by reading coreboot mailing list (like an old cow), reading stuff about computer architecture, making hardware tools and trying to understand how git works 
Done some patches, unfortunately, nobody likes it
Temporary libpayload fixes for flashrom as a payload
Flashrom as a payload with usb flash drive support
SerialICE for coreboot
Triggering another payload
For the second half of GSoC:
I’m working on “carFlashrom” (Yep, sounds a bit french) project:
http://www.coreboot.org/pipermail/coreboot/2011-July/065902.html
If this project is possible, then flashing would be possible without working RAM.
I would like to receive some response to my mails in the list as I am confused with my project goals, what others do think? I need some alternative goal if this is not feasible.
Give me some thoughts.
Bonus for readers: this one might be used with flashrom as rayer_spi. Modify flashrom source according to pinout and bits of par port registers:
http://logix4u.net/Legacy_Ports/Parallel_Port/A_tutorial_on_Parallel_port_Interfacing.html
I used m74hc244 from ST, even though parport signals are 5V, the chip is working right with VCC 3.3V.
u-boot as coreboot payload
7U-boot is bootloader on ARMs, PowerPCs and other platforms, it has a nice set of commands and in general it feels like a small operating system. I’m not certainly sure if it is good direction, please feel free to compare with UEFI 
but I simply miss it on x86. I work at SYSGO with u-boot in daily basis and even port it to different boards/platforms. The x86 is no easy to init and I think this is the reason why there is only one x86 board in whole u-boot tree. This board is called eNET and it has a AMD ELAN SC520 SOC. But luckily, with coreboot we can init much more x86 boards and this leads to natural conclusion to have the u-boot as the coreboot payload. I would like to share with you part of this “fantastic” hacking journey to make it happen. (more…)
coreboot porting to jetway PA78VM5 have been 95% successful.
0606 days
i am glad to say that the Jetway PA78VM5 mainboard can run coreboot sucessfully. The configuration of Jetway PA78VM5 can be found at PA78VM5.the coreboot+filo can work fine. The kernel began booting, but the only problem is after kernel shows”jumping to **” the serial port stoped showing anything. And i have already set the kernel parameter with “console=ttyS0,115200″
First of all thank olsen provide me this mainboard.
The mainboard have an SPI flash W25X80A, my SF100+testchip SO08 can detect the flash type, but can not erase the flash correctly. After contacted with dediprog engineer. i remove the flash from the board, it seems fine, the programming is fine, but i can not use it with the mainboard unless i can bear removing the flash chip every time i need to rebuild the coreboot. After that, i replace that flash chip with an sst 080b. it worked pretty fine.
another problem is while the coreboot booting, it stoped while corebooting trying to extract the cbfs files. i debugged this for a long time, finally thanks to patrick, i take his advice remove the $(CBFS_COMPRESS_FLAG).it worked.
the latest problem is that amd famlily10 may have much problem with the current build version.
i should find out what difference between btdc and coreboot public version caused problems.
my next step may focus on this things merge the code, and find out why the kernel did not show the booting message.
i am so glad that coreboot can finally booting the Jetway PA78VM5
libopenstm32 – a Free Software firmware library for STM32 ARM Cortex-M3 microcontrollers
720 days
I guess it's time to finally announce libopenstm32, a Free Software firmware library for STM32 ARM Cortex-M3 microcontrollers me and a few other people have been working on in recent weeks. The library is licensed under the GNU GPL, version 3 or later (yes, that's an intentional decision after some discussions we had).
The code is available via git:
$ git clone git://libopenstm32.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/libopenstm32/libopenstm32 $ cd libopenstm32 $ make
Building is done using a standard ARM gcc cross-compiler (arm-elf or arm-none-eabi for instance), see the summon-arm-toolchain script for the basic idea about how to build one.
The current status of the library is listed in the wiki. In short: some parts of GPIOs, UART, I2C, SPI, RCC, Timers and some other basic stuff works and has register definitions (and some convenience functions, but not too many, yet). We're working on adding support for more subsystems, any help with this is highly welcome of course! Luckily ARM stuff (and especially the STM32) has pretty good (and freely available) datasheets.
We have a few simple example programs, e.g. for the Olimex STM32-H103 eval board (see photo). JTAG flashing can be done using OpenOCD, for example.
Feel free to join the mailing lists and/or the #libopenstm32 IRC channel on Freenode.
The current list of projects where we plan to use this library is Open-BLDC (an Open Hardware / Free Software brushless motor controller project by Piotr Esden-Tempski), openmulticopter (an Open Hardware / Free Software quadrocopter/UAV project), openbiosprog (an Open Hardware / Free Software BIOS chip flash programmer I'm in the process of designing using gEDA/PCB), and probably a few more.
If you plan to work on any new (or existing) microcontroller hardware- or software-projects involving an STM32 microcontroller, please consider using libopenstm32 (it's the only Free Software library for this microcontroller family I know of) and help us make it better and more complete. Thanks!
Resolving mysterious kernel/firmware problems via apt-get install firmware-linux
1044 days
by Uwe Hermann
in firmware
If you recently upgraded your kernel to the 2.6.29 Debian package, you might have noticed some (e.g. graphics) drivers stopped working or are working slower. In my case, this was the radeon driver, which inexplicably seemed to cause lots of slowdowns in some applications and games. A quick look into dmesg revealed the reason:
[drm] Initialized radeon 1.29.0 20080528 on minor 0 agpgart-intel 0000:00:00.0: AGP 2.0 bridge agpgart-intel 0000:00:00.0: putting AGP V2 device into 4x mode pci 0000:01:00.0: putting AGP V2 device into 4x mode [drm] Setting GART location based on new memory map [drm] Loading R200 Microcode platform radeon_cp.0: firmware: requesting radeon/R200_cp.bin radeon_cp: Failed to load firmware "radeon/R200_cp.bin" [drm:radeon_do_init_cp] *ERROR* Failed to load firmware!
As noted in the changelog file, the radeon firmware R200_cp.bin has been removed from the kernel, and is now available in the separate firmware-linux Debian package. So the simple fix for this issues is:
$ apt-get install firmware-linux $ dpkg -L firmware-linux | grep R200_cp.bin /lib/firmware/radeon/R200_cp.bin
After restarting X, the dmesg output looks more sane again:
agpgart-intel 0000:00:00.0: AGP 2.0 bridge agpgart-intel 0000:00:00.0: putting AGP V2 device into 4x mode pci 0000:01:00.0: putting AGP V2 device into 4x mode [drm] Setting GART location based on new memory map [drm] Loading R200 Microcode platform radeon_cp.0: firmware: requesting radeon/R200_cp.bin [drm] writeback test succeeded in 2 usecs
Coreboot hacking: How to solder a PLCC socket on your board
1059 days
When trying to port coreboot (previously LinuxBIOS) to a new mainboard you're often confronted with a big problem: the BIOS/ROM chip on the respective motherboard is soldered onto the board (i.e., not in a socket).
This means that you cannot easily (hot-)swap the chip during development or for recovery purposes. So you basically have exactly one try to flash the ROM chip with a fully working/booting coreboot image. If that goes wrong your board is bricked.
This makes it pretty much impossible to develop a coreboot port for such boards (and soldered-on ROM chips are becoming more and more common, unfortunately).
However, I've recently tried to replace the soldered-on (PLCC) ROM chip on one of my boards with a socket. What sounds pretty scary at first, especially given that I have almost non-existant soldering skills, turned out to be really not that hard. Also, it can be done with relatively cheap and readily available equipment.
I have written a short HOWTO for desoldering chips and soldering on sockets in the coreboot wiki, and also finished a video showing most of the process, which I hope will be helpful for others:
- archive.org: Ogg Theora, small (32 MB), Ogg Theora, big (154 MB)
- Youtube (FLV, small, 13 MB). Direct download:
$ youtube-dl -t 'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30x4oxyczH4'
- blip.tv: FLV, small (20 MB)
The video is CC-BY-SA 3.0, music is taken from ccmixter.org and is CC-NC 3.0 licensed. Video editing was done using Kino (which uses ffmpeg2theora for Ogg Theora export).
I also tried to upload the video to Vimeo, but first they told me to install the Flash 10 abomination (and there's no way I will do that). After browsing the help/forum pages a bit I found a traditional, non-flash upload form, but that then tells me that I cannot upload Ogg Theora videos. WTF?
The Ogg Theora video support feature request has been open for more that a year. Until that issue is fixed I'll just use other video services, thanks...