[GSoC] EC/H8S firmware week #2

The last week was a little bit depressive. I did the some resoldering. Pin P90 wasn’t connected to 3.3V which is needed to enter the flash boot mode. It was soldered  to the VCC of the Serial level shifter MAX3243. After searching some minutes with the Multimeter for a better power source, I decieded to use 3.3V near the H8S. It’s now a very long cable across the board.

Now let’s see, how good this works? Nothing :(. Recheck with a voltmeter and found another problem with P91 (/SUS_STAT). When connecting SUS_STAT with an 1k resistor to 3.3V the voltmeter shows 0.04V. This means it’s driven by something else to 0V. My hope was that the chipset isn’t driving this until it’s powered. But sadly it is driving it to 0V. What’s SUS_STAT? SUS_STAT can be used as LPCPD (LPC power down) and is used to notify devices to enter a low power state soon. Suspend Status is active low, which means all device should be in low power mode.
What should I do now? I need 3.3V on that line.

There are multiple solution:

  • Remove 1k and burn it to death. But likely this could kill the chipset or
    a least this certain pin or multiple pins
  • Cut the pin
  • Bend the pin upwards while desoldering
  • Desolder the whole chip and bend afterwards, resolder
  • Replace the chip with a socket (expensive and rare)

This decision is not easy to take, especially because I never done most
of these things. This got me stuck for a while until Peter helped me out,
he bend a single pin upwards. Thanks!

The next week milestone is still flashing the EC, the same goal since the first week. So the time schedule will be a little big chaotic. Maybe I can hurry up and reach another weekly goal fast than a week.

Because I was stuck on that a little bit, I took another look on ebay and bought a development board with a H8S/2633. 2633 is a little bit newer than the 2100 series
which is used in Lenovo laptops. The board should arrive in one week, but atm it’s in german customs. Such development boards are hard to get for a “good” price. Brand new boards start with several hundred euros or dollars. E.g. the debugger E10 (USB device) cost around 1000 Euro, it’s only a stupid USB device. I already bought on ebay an E8, previous generation debugger, but it can not debug the chip, only flash them with the Renesas software/IDE.

Beside my project I’ve done some other work on coreboot. I helped Holger Levsen on creating a reproducible build job for coreboot on reproducible.debian.net. More info about reproducible builds are on their wiki page.  To improve reproducibility I created 2 patches #10448 #10449. They cleaned up reproducible bugs in coreboot and without building Payloads, most targets are now reproducible. Great thanks to Holger Levsen for his work on that!