On 23.09.2021 17:34, Peter Stuge wrote: > Brian Milliron wrote: >> Can you elaborate on what factors determine whether setting up coreboot >> on a previously unsupported laptop takes days or years? > Mainboards are more or less modified reference designs for a given > platform, where platform means the combination of Intel or AMD chips > intended to be used together. > > coreboot supports several or even many platforms, but not all, and > more than likely the support for each platform covers only what is > required for the supported mainboards using that platform. > > If your platform is unsupported you have thousands of registers to study, > most of which are either not at all or merely not correctly described in > public documentation. > > This case is the "years" end of the spectrum, when no source code and no > usable documentation is publically available. I'd guess that this is > actually still the common case, even though coreboot has good industry > traction. (Many companies do use coreboot but not on all possible platforms.) > > > If your platform is supported to some degree but your specific mainboard > is not then you have to understand the exact details of all differences > between your mainboard and the general platform support in coreboot. > > Maybe there is no code for things you require or maybe it's there but > you must correctly describe how your hardware differs from a reference > design or one particular supported mainboard. > > Those differences are usually never well-documented, are never > purposely published and are quite unlikely to ever leak. Leaked > schematics can be helpful, but may not always suffice. > > This means another pile of unknowns to first discover and then study > in depth. > > Once that's done, turn learned knowledge into working coreboot > support for your mainboard. > > There is tooling (in coreboot) to help with parts of the latter. > Tools extract as much information as possible from a running system > and try to automatically turn that into coreboot support. > > The "days" end of the spectrum is when you are lucky and such tools > can completely and accurately capture all required information for > your hardware without requiring much learning. > > > Personal experience and background are further factors, someone with > zero knowledge about hardware and zero interest to learn will likely > fail no matter how much time they invest. > > Zero knowledge with significant interest is a completely different > story and can yield a successful world class coreboot developer. :) > > > There's no x86 firmware development "course", I think you have to > just start doing it and teach yourself as you go. Actually, there is: [1], [2]. What is more, it's 100% free and much more classes are coming soon. We are working on hardware hands-on class currently [3]. We will be using the Dell OptiPlex 7010 here [4], which we added into the coreboot tree some time ago.
[1] https://p.ost2.fyi/ [2] https://p.ost2.fyi/courses/course-v1:OpenSecurityTraining2+Arch4031_x86-64_RV_coreboot+2021_v1/about [3] https://p.ost2.fyi/courses/course-v1:OpenSecurityTraining2+Arch4032_coreboot_HW_HandsOn+2021_v1/about [4] https://3mdeb.com/shop/open-source-hardware/ost2-arch4032-minimum-configuration-optiplex-7010-sff-i3-3240-rte/ > > > Kind regards > > //Peter -- Maciej Pijanowski Engineering Manager GPG: 9963C36AAC3B2B46 https://3mdeb.com | @3mdeb_com
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