[coreboot] Dell latitude c610

[Joseph Smith]

On Fri, 26 Jun 2009 21:10:16 +0200, Uwe Hermann <uwe at hermann-uwe.de> wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Fri, Jun 26, 2009 at 12:33:14PM +0200, CybFr wrote:
>> I'd like to re-open a tread from Michal Janke about supporting Dell
> latitude
>> C610 and its SMSC LPC47N252 SuperIO.
>>
>> - I've found the closest chip from SMSC was FDC37N972, supported by
>> superiotool so I added corresponding entries in smsc.c.
>>
>> - for  FDC, UARTS, KBD, RTC, everything seems quite common so I added it
> in
>> /superio/smsc/smsssuperio/superio.c.
>> (the big difference betweenn supported smsc chips an LPC47N252 is the
>> EC-8051 core... )
>>
>> What could be the next step ?
> 
> Well, that's the million dollar question. We don't yet support _any_
> laptop in coreboot exactly because of the EC problems (well, among other
> problems).
> 
> Luckily, the LPC47N252 datasheet seems to contain some amount of info
> about the EC, so maybe it's doable. However, we don't know too much
> about this stuff at this point. Chipset is 830MP which should be doable,
> so all in all this might be a reasonably well-suited laptop if you want
> to invest some time and energy into coreboot on this laptop.
> 
> I'm also trying to do something similar with an ancient 440BX laptop
> here, see http://www.coreboot.org/Dell_Latitude_CPi_A366XT, but I
> haven't gotten very far, yet.
> 
> First thing you should do is to get a known-good backup image of your
> current BIOS, flash that on a different chip and see if the laptop still
> boots with that. Until this works, I wouldn't recommend to proceed.
> 
> Is this a PLCC chip, and is it in a socket or soldered onto the board?
> If soldered, do you have equipment and skills to desolder it and put on
> a socket? See http://www.coreboot.org/Soldering_a_socket_on_your_board
> for PLCC sockets, for other types of chips it may be a bit harder.
> 
> Can you make high-res pictures of the whole laptop board (front and back
> side etc, especially of the Super I/O / EC? We can put those in the wiki
> also if you want to release them under a freeish license (CC, public
> domain, etc).
> 
> The next step would probably be to find out where the EC code lives in
> the flash ROM chip, make a coreboot.rom which leaves that area empty
> and then 'dd' the EC blob over the empty area. Flash that, attach a POST
> card and/or null-modem cable and see what happens...
> 
> Anyway, if you have any superiotool or superio/smsc/smsssuperio/superio.c
> patches which are generic and could be reused for other stuff, please
post
> them with a Signed-off-by so we can commit them, see
> http://www.coreboot.org/Development_Guidelines#Sign-off_Procedure
> 
> 
I would also like to add, I very glad to help you with the i830 part.

-- 
Thanks,
Joseph Smith
Set-Top-Linux
www.settoplinux.org