ron minnich wrote:
This is a place where I'd like us to pick a common most-appropriate
notebook and go for it.
So which of these is the most likely to be doable? We'll have to solve
the EC problem.
But don't be confused as to what the "EC problem" really is. We've
discussed this before on this very list: Open firmware for the EC would
be great, but it is a problem on the scope of coreboot itself, since
every platform would need a slightly "custom" variant of the firmware,
and over time you would end up needing to support different "chips" for
different "mainboards". Certainly that is an interesting problem to
solve, but I don't think that it is _our_ problem to solve.
Coreboot would be much better served by operating with the "stock"
firmware. Don't get me wrong - this is still a challenge because, like
I said in IRC yesterday, we don't know what we don't know. Behavior at
runtime is fairly standardized, but we don't know what we need to do for
initialization - do we need to set up registers, put in tables, kick
things, or will it all Just Work (TM)?
I guess the only way to find out is to start trying - enough
documentation exists (especially for th ENE) that we can probably
determine how large the firmware is and extract it from a stock ROM, and
try it out. From what I have heard, I think the VIA processors are the
best bet right now for experimentation. Intel of course, is out, and
AMD processors aren't in any netbooks to speak of - and I'm sure if we
go to this effort, we would rather have it pay off for a netbook rather
then a dinosaur laptop.
Jordan
--
coreboot mailing list: [email protected]
http://www.coreboot.org/mailman/listinfo/coreboot
