[LinuxBIOS] linuxbios support for thinkpads?

Peter Stuge peter at stuge.se
Wed Sep 19 22:02:49 CEST 2007


On Tue, Sep 18, 2007 at 07:04:01PM -0400, Corey Osgood wrote:
> Robinson Tryon wrote:
> > Would writing to Intel (if only to be counted as one more data
> > point) help at all?

No.


> > I thought that Intel had a pretty good track record with the FOSS
> > community, what with their wireless cards and integrated graphics
> > cards having nice, open drivers... but perhaps it was all about the
> > money and they didn't actually care about maintaining a relationship
> > with the community at all...

Intel is a big company, by choice or accident the attitude towards
open source software is not the same everywhere.


> Intel's datasheets are available freely online. I don't know if
> there's more info that they send to Award, etc, but the i440bx,
> i810, and now i830 ports were all written from those.

These are all pretty old chipsets. Public data sheets for the newer
ones have significantly less useful information.

The fact that Intel also have their own boot software EFI may also be
a reason why they don't throw data sheets at us, but that is pure
speculation.


> It's the embedded controllers, which may/may not be Intel's design,
> that are the biggest discouragement for most people considering
> laptop ports.

Very true. Noone usually knows how the black box works and it's often
involved in everything that differs between a laptop and a desktop;
ie. all the reasons the user bought the laptop like power management,
integrated special keys etc.


//Peter




More information about the coreboot mailing list