Hello Coreboot community,
After a rather long hiatus (my last commits to LinuxBIOS were in 2005) - my work had moved me to PPC/MIPS and now mainly ARM architectures, so have been using u-boot for many years.
The company I work for has a large range of embedded devices, for which we use a common platform for ARM devices, and we have completed a major re-work on this platform to ensure RED and CRA compliance. I have been tasked with migrating a range of industrial embedded x86 devices to our common platform, to prepare these products for CRA compliance. There are many thousands of these x86 devices in the field, using either Q7 or COM-Express modules with various generations (Bay Trail, Apollo Lake and Elkhart Lake) of Intel processors.
My 2 concerns are boot speed and BIOS updates. Devices with Bay Trail and Apollo Lake SoC's have customised BIOS's and it appears as though the BIOS vendor simply forked their BIOS code in 2015 and no security updates have been made at all - even though they have made modifications to these BIOS's as recently as November 2025. Of course attempting to find real information about this is impossible.
I have been looking through the Coreboot documentation in a lot of detail in preparation, but would like to ask for some friendly advice about de-bricking these devices when I start trying to flash coreboot into them! All of these modules have SO-8 SPI flash devices on them, and I assume a good SPI flash programmer would be useful, I also guess for development that an SPI flash emulator could be very useful. Could anyone provide me recommendations for decent devices for this purpose?
Hamish
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