Category: coreboot

Google releases Intel Sandybridge support for coreboot

Exciting times! In the last couple of days, Google has released a major piece of coreboot support for the Intel Sandybridge processor and Cougar Point southbridge. This is the first time that coreboot supports the latest generation of Intel chipsets. In the next weeks more code will be released to support a number of mainboards with this processor/chipset combination. Stay tuned!

Check out the article on Phoronix.

 

Flip Bits, Not Burgers – coreboot GSoC 2012 – Update

Update –

coreboot was not selected to participate in GSoC 2012. This is
disappointing new for the project. I do not know why we were not
selected this year. I will attend the post selection meeting to see
what we can do to improve our chances of selection next year.

Students, thank you for your interest in coreboot. We are happy that
you are engaging with our community. I hope that you continue
exploring your interest in coreboot. Please let us know what we can do
to assist you in your learning.

Feel free to send me questions, comments, or concerns.

Regards,
Marc

http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/

Continue reading Flip Bits, Not Burgers – coreboot GSoC 2012 – Update

Intel i5000 northbridge code commited

I’ve started that port in November 2011, and made it finally working in January. Well, at least working on my Supermicro X7DB8 Board. Compared to the vendor BIOS which takes about 30 seconds from power-on to grub, coreboot finishes the same task in 3s. Unfortunately the VGA BIOS takes about 2 seconds to program the register to do 80×25 resolution, so eventually we end up with 5s. If you don’t need a VGA console, and prefer a serial console, you can save even these two seconds.

Actually i didn’t expect the port progressing so fast. One tool that was a great help was serialice. I used it to watch the original BIOS initializing memory. To get serialice running, all you have to do is writing a few lines of board specific C code, which initializes the serial port and some basic chipset parts required for accessing the serial port registers. On the host side, a patched QEMU is running, executing the vendor BIOS while redirecting HW accesses to the target computer. Which HW accesses are redirected can be configured by a small lua script. LUA can also be used to pretty print the output from serialice.

Continue reading Intel i5000 northbridge code commited

Coreboot in shipping products

We are starting to see coreboot in more shipping products this summer and I expect even more in the fall. The exciting thing is that coreboot is becoming a piece of technology that vendors are starting to advertise. A recent example is the Portwell PCS-8277:

PORTWELL ANNOUNCES REVOLUTIONARY IN-VEHICLE PC
WITH THE BOOT SPEED OF AN APPLIANCE New PCS-8277 telematics system based on Coreboot® technology with HD graphics processing engine 

I think that we are starting to see vendors and customers becoming more knowledgeable about what is going into their products and how coreboot is an advantage in many situations. I hope to see more announcements in the coming months.

Flashrom 0.9.4 released – Flashing BIOS/ROM chips from the Unix/Linux command line using various programmers

flashrom logo

Forgot to mention this here: We released flashrom 0.9.4 a few days ago, the latest release of the open-source, GPL'd ROM chip flashing software for Linux, *BSD, DOS, and partially also Windows (work in progress, though).

Here's a quick summary of the release announcement. Some of the noteworthy news items include:

  • Support for new programmers: OpenMoko Neo1973/Neo FreeRunner debug board version 2 or 3, Olimex ARM-USB-TINY, ARM-USB-TINY-H, ARM-USB-OCD, and ARM-USB-OCD-H, Open Graphics Project development card (OGD1), Angelbird Wings PCIe SSD/88SX7042, ITE IT85xx embedded controllers, Intel NICs with parallel flash.
  • Dozens of added flash chips, chipsets, mainboards.
  • Improved Dediprog SF100 support.
  • Add support for more than one Super I/O or EC per machine.
  • Always read the flash chip before writing, for improved error checking and faster programming.
  • Enable write support on NVIDIA MCP6x/MCP7x.
  • Lots of bugfixes, documentation fixes, internal improvements, etc.

Get the latest release tarball, or download and build the most recent version via Subversion:

  $ svn co svn://flashrom.org/flashrom/trunk flashrom
  $ cd flashrom
  $ make

I already updated the Debian package to 0.9.4 (it has also already migrated to Debian testing and Ubuntu), other people have updated Fedora, Gentoo, NetBSD etc. etc.

There's already a huge amount of patches queued for the next release, including support for even more programmers, PowerPC support (tested on Mac Mini and others), and of course the usual "more boards, more chips" items...

GSoC 2011: little trip

This might be not a good idea, but I had got bored with my project not going well, so I eventually got on trip, through “FOSS and friends” 🙂 I have had some headache with nouveau driver, till I understood that deprecated version was installed. Tried to install a package, which got me in a geometric progression of required dependency packages 🙂 I have filed a bug for LibreOffice, and got one future TODO for “reverse enginering” how exactly CUPS works with one of the label printers we have here as it needs a slight modification. The best thing I have done is started reading a book and building “Linux From Scratch (LFS)”. It’s great while building a package you are accompanied with a short page of info about it, not all manual 🙂 Also I have found out that I don’t have good stuff to read, except that 1k pages book about Linux internals 🙂 While looking at the freenode chatrooms list I have found this resource about c language: http://www.iso-9899.info – all it needs is time for reading everything 🙂

 

My project progress is really slow. As Marc suggested I have done some work to reduce stack usage: wrapped functions to read and use file by 256B peaces (somewhat default granularity). But that still needs testing and cleaning up. Also I need to cleanup my previous work that I haven’t submitted to the list, which enabled running code in car (even though not completely working, as mtrr settings might be wrong or more problems still there).

AMD adds Family10 G34 coreboot support

AMD has added the Family10 G34 support to coreboot. This new support located in the AGESA vendorcode area. This AGESA code should be used for new Family 10 development. The initial development platform is the Super Micro H8QGI+-F mainboard.

 

Thanks to Kerry and Frank @ AMD for the submission.

 

A small side note, this addition put coreboot tree at over a million lines of code.

 

GSoC2011: coreboot spice payload, OE and rootfs

As stated in my midterm report I’m working this first 2 weeks after midterm to work on building the payload image. I wanted to hardcode everything but we(my mentor and I) understood it would be better to use something like OpenEmbedded for that.

 
This first week I studied OpenEmbedded. I tested many distributions starting with angstrom, they showed too heavy for our purpose. After those tests I found micro and realized it would be a better start.

 
With that I’m working around micro to build our own distro, I’m adding X11 dependencies and right now I’m packing the spice client and its dependencies. In the end of the week I must have sorted every details.