[coreboot] Hackaton in Prague 2011

[Florentin Demetrescu]

Hello,

I wanted to reply but Rudolph was more swift than me (I'm so lazy these days! ..
;-)), but I can give you my travel impressions..
The hackathon in Prague proceeded very well, the organisation was excellent and
we have been well received by Rudolph.

I arrived by car from France Friday evening. My journey was approximatively 14
hours from Paris to Prague. Unfortunately for me, it wasn't possible for me to
stay 2 full days (so many personal projects pending!!..), so I had to quit
early Sunday.

The accomodation was in the Masarykova dormitory of the CVUT University of
Prague (the University of Rudolph), and it was OK (even if it was "student
style" ;-))

On the technical side, Rudolph succeded to reserve a classroom in his
University, so we installed our stuff early Saturday and began to work:
 - Rudolph on the integration of U-Boot with coreboot;
 - Christi focused mostly on the cleaning and reorganisation of some coreboot
code, but I don't remember very well what (Christi can you give more details?)
 - Sven and Bjärne worken with the T60 laptop coreboot port (again I'm not sure:
can you give more details?);
 - for Peter I don't remember what was his topic of interest but he helped me
very heavily for my board:
 - my objective was to install coreboot on my new board MA785GMT-UDH2. I had
bring with me a Phenom II 1055T CPU with 6 cores. Unfortunately I met big
problems because:
    * the factory BIOS version (F4) wasn't fit for this kind of CPU, so I was
unable to boot the board even with the factory BIOS, so no flashrom solution for
installing coreboot;
    * Peter helped me to "socketise" the BIOS chip and Sven helped me with his
external programmer, but unfortunately the curent release of coreboot didn' work
=> it crashed at some stage in early initialisation (romstage.c?) before
microcode update if I remember well..

To conclude, globally this hackaton was great for me even if I didn't get great
results on the technical side, but the oportunity to meet and work with other
coreboot people greatly offsets those technical drawbacks..

Thank you again friends and especially you Rudolph for this great event!
Hope I see you soon at the next coreboot hackaton!
 Florentin

PS : a friend of mine gave me a Phenom II with 4 cores so I was able to update
the factory BIOS (I installed the F6 revision), and the board boots flawlessly
with the factory bios even with my 6 core Phenom II cpu! So it is NOT a power
supply problem Rudolph and Peter.. ;-). I didn't had the time to reinstall
coreboot and give it a run, but I will do that ASAP! Also I will investigate the
problem of the 6 core Phenom II on this board..

Quoting Rudolf Marek <r.marek at assembler.cz>:

> Hi,
>
> > I am very interested in what you have done and achieved. Could some of
> > the attendees write something up? That would be awesome.
>
> Oh well I thought that someone ELSE will write what we were doing. I had to
> wrote by myself about FOSDEM too. :)
>
> If not then I will write about that soonish. Thanks for a ping.
>
> Thanks
> Rudolf
>
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