Hi Matthijs, Matthijs Kooijman wrote: > > > http://pcengines.ch/alix.htm > > > > coreboot > > It seems that these boards are shipped with TinyBIOS, which is also > release under an open license. Is coreboot so much faster/more > open/better?
I certainly think so, but as a coreboot developer I will be biased. :) TinyBIOS is a light and lean BIOS while coreboot has another focus. coreboot doesn't want to be a BIOS, it only does very early hardware initialization and then it hands over to another program (the payload in coreboot terms) which can be a bootloader (FILO for kernels on disk, EtherBoot/gPXE network etc) or a Linux kernel or even an application using the C library libpayload. There is also an open source BIOS payload called SeaBIOS. The payload goes with coreboot into the flash chip. > Also, I don't see any removable flash chip on the boards. Does this > mean that if^H^Hwhen you brick the board, it's over, or is there > some backdoor? As was mentioned, the LPC bus is available on a pin header, and PC Engines offer the LPC.1A product for those who want to experiment with firmware: http://pcengines.ch/lpc1a.htm It's not available in the order form, but just send them an email, they are very friendly. Of course you can also hook up a ROM emulator to the LPC bus. There are a few different products available, more or less commercial. One open source solution called the FLASH-PLAICE just uses the Xilinx Spartan 3E FPGA eval board. PC Engines also make pinouts and many schematics available online which warms the hardware hacker hearts. :) //Peter
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