Excerpts from Corey Osgood's message of Wed Apr 20 19:55:22 -0400 2011: > On Wed, Apr 20, 2011 at 9:07 AM, Philippe LeCavalier > <[email protected]> wrote: > > Excerpts from Stefan Reinauer's message of Tue Apr 19 21:30:35 -0400 2011: > >> * Philippe LeCavalier <[email protected]> [110419 20:22]: > > [..] > >> If your BIOS works for you, you should consider keeping it. > >> > >> Porting coreboot to a new mainboard is a significant effort and you will > >> have to make sure you have ways to recover from failure (i.e. get your > >> external flash writer and/or soldering iron ready) > > hm. I see. I was hoping the worst case would be flashing it back to the > > original BIOS. A soldering gun is a bit extreme considering my current > > setup works just fine. > > > >> However, in some cases you can get to sub second firmware boot times > >> with coreboot. And it is open source, so you can add or remove whatever > >> feature you require or not. > > Despite the aforementioned this is still somewhat appealing to me. > > > > [..] > > > > To ensure I fully comprehend the risk here...Backing up the BIOS isn't > > my insurance policy; I'd actually have to replace the chip? Once I've > > got a clear understanding of the worst-case scenario I'll feel stronger > > about making a decision. > > Where this is a laptop, the flash chip will definitely be soldiered > onto the motherboard. Also, you will definitely have an embedded > controller (EC), and that will keep flashrom from working out of the > box, so you'll need either an external flash programmer (most likely > an SPI flash chip) or to do quite a bit of digging and legwork to > figure out how to poke the embedded controller to allow access to the > flash chip (and then remove the flash chip and put in a socket, or > else hack together something to switch between two flash chips). Also, > don't expect to find datasheets on the embedded controller, they're > typically covered by some fairly restrictive NDAs. > > The EC also will come into play during hardware init, so you'll also > need to figure out how to initialize it. You may need to initialize it > before you can even initialize the ram. > > See also http://www.coreboot.org/Laptop > hm. This is likely a common occurrence, but this sounds to complex for me mostly because the system in question is a system I rely on for work. Maybe I'll grab an older system I don't rely on a see if I can find a well supported chipset to play with. I've got a few older desktop systems that might fit the bill a bit more. Thanks for all the insight from everyone that responded. Once I get a few minutes to myself I'll put together a system and try my luck with coreboot. -- Thanks, Phil
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