[coreboot] Request to see if Coreboot will work for a Gigabyte BRIX GB-XM14-1037

[Patrick Georgi]

Am Freitag, den 06.12.2013, 20:05 -0600 schrieb Jeremy White:
> If I were to change the second paragraph as follows:
> 
>   If your board is not already supported, it will likely take
>   you years of work to port coreboot to operate correctly on it.
   "unless you have experience with firmware level C development and
    good knowledge of the x86 architecture."

With the chipset supported, experience and a bit of luck, a port can
happen in a week (but these constraints are pretty nasty in themselves).
Our problem is that there is no simple answer. I guess Peter prefers
caution (to put it mildly), because a more nuanced answer is usually
interpreted way too optimistically.

> And then change the final paragraph to read:
>   Usually in less than a day, someone will respond on the mailing list,
>   most often with bad news.  However, it is possible that your board
>   is supported, or that support is under development, so it won't hurt to ask.
"most often with bad news" is a good idea. Thanks for the suggestion.

To look a bit closer at the device you proposed:
The processor and chipset might actually be supported in coreboot, when
using binary only components, at least their families are.
The bad thing is that we even couldn't work around minor issues because
the initialization code is binary only, and the datasheets we can access
are also spotty.
Intel isn't exactly cooperative in the firmware space, and so that's all
we can work with these days.
You'd have better luck with AMD setups. It's still hard, but at least we
have the code and datasheets.

If the BRIX uses some embedded controller, then all bets are off, since
it might just work, or it might require lots of code talking to an
unknown interface.
That's a piece of information we can usually only get from mainboard
pictures, since these chips rarely show up in (consumer facing) data
sheets.


Patrick