There is i915 support in coreboot, not sure how much of that libreboot got when it forked.
ca 2002, David Hendriks and I got graphics working, which later led to this fun video: https://youtu.be/DmK_SQI56fQ?si=cNhl1v-5ZR4f5VYM I put the i915 support in coreboot while I was working on chromebooks. We showed this can be fast: https://youtu.be/4qLDjHThCyE?si=KFAkWdZjG1ggsRlp as compared to intel's incredibly slow graphics layer in UEFI. (that video ignores Intel's VGA BIOS entirely; it is coreboot vs. linux graphics startup). Later, others greatly improved the coreboot graphics support. I have no idea what libreboot has done, or if they've kept up. Libreboot did have a desire not to use vendor graphics BIOS in startup (i.e. no blobs), and that might be an issue. as for coreboot, x220, and Plan 9: do you see anything at all on the screen before linux starts? I developed coreboot graphics support by watching all the ins/outs/memory read/memory write that linux did.This was possible because, at the time (2012) Jesse Barnes, then at Intel, had worked hard to make LInux graphics work without needing the Intel video BIOS: chromebooks in normal mode let Linux do ALL graphics startup. IIUC, Intel did not keep that BIOS-independence going, and I believe a BIOS-free graphics setup on Intel display hardware no longer works. If you really want to chase this down, you can do the same thing I did. You'll be surprised at how little it takes to get that last step going. Usually, it's something very simple. I think it would be nice to have coreboot+plan 9+x220 working. We could then even consider using a 4 byte address SPI part and put Plan 9 boot file system in firmware :-) A handy way to test things out is to start up your x220, cpu in, and experiment with poking the frame buffer. What has not been tried, but ought to work, is cpu in, run linux in a vm, and let it bring the buffer up. That would be really interesting. On Sun, Nov 23, 2025 at 8:05 AM Emery <[email protected]> wrote: > With my x220 and coreboot the graphics are not initialized by 9front on > coldboot. > > if you boot into Linux, load the i915 module, then do a hot-reboot into > 9front, then it works. > > Cheers, > Emery ------------------------------------------ 9fans: 9fans Permalink: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/T82d344ab9bb6e428-M7d1444d9bf25f89b711616cd Delivery options: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/subscription
