maxime.corne--- via coreboot wrote: > I know this question had been asked many times, but is it possible > to have Coreboot on modern hardware?
The general answer is yes, it is possible under certain conditions. What those conditions are depends both on the particular hardware platform (CPU+chipset generation) and on what decisions the system integrator (ODM and/or OEM) has made before shipping the machine. Fairly modern consumer products are indeed supported in the coreboot master tree. Another set of conditions determines *how* a coreboot image could be installed onto a machine which was sold without coreboot. Regardless of those conditions, desoldering the flash chip and either reprogramming it externally or soldering a new, already programmed flash chip onto the mainboard will always work, assuming of course that the flash is a discrete component, which is not always the case. The boot flash is sometimes part of an embedded controller - I've only seen this on some Thinkpads so far. > After some research on the Internet, I found out coreboot couldn’t > be port to modern hardware because of an Intel technology which > encrypt the bios (I might be wrong, if so, sorry). Encryption (signatures actually, not encryption) isn't relevant for porting, but if the system integrator has enabled BootGuard in the "wrong" way then the signature verification is intended to make it impossible to install coreboot onto the system. In that case, and a few others, the only option is to desolder the flash chip and work with external programming options. > On the other end, companies like System76 are able to ship modern > processor with Coreboot. Because they are the system integrator they are allowed to make the neccessary decisions to enable coreboot on their machines, and they are better positioned to have access to the relevant information for porting coreboot - but don't be fooled, the platform vendors (Intel, AMD) do not release the neccessary information for coreboot porting to anyone at all. Anyone who asks for it is told the same old lie: "Nobody is asking for that information so we don't make it available." > I’d be more than happy to tinker with my hardware, so how you would > you do to put coreboot on a recent thinkpad by replacing the bios chip? Desolder the flash chip and create a header solution for the 5 relevant pins so that you can move the flash chip between your laptop and a programmer like a beaglebone or worst case raspberrypi, make a backup of the original contents outside your laptop, download and build coreboot, program the flash outside your laptop, connect it to the laptop, try to boot, and start debugging why the boot fails... ;) Hope this helps //Peter _______________________________________________ coreboot mailing list -- coreboot@coreboot.org To unsubscribe send an email to coreboot-le...@coreboot.org
