[coreboot] [RFC] Netbook Support

[Richard Smith]

ron minnich wrote:
> This is a place where I'd like us to pick a common most-appropriate
> notebook and go for it.
> 
> So which of these is the most likely to be doable? We'll have to solve
> the EC problem.

I know the Intel Atom is probably a problem for coreboot but here at 
muppet labs we have gone through a Eee PC900A and an AOA-110

The ASUS uses a EnE KB3310 where the ACER has a Winbond WPCE775

Its highly likely that the KB3310 (and other EnE EC chips) will have a 
lot of similarity to the KB3700 
http://wiki.laptop.org/images/a/ab/KB3700-ds-01.pdf

Based on info in this thread

http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?pid=99076

and here:

http://code.google.com/p/eeetune/wiki/KBMemoryMap

A few people are already working on this for the Eee.  You can certainly 
have some non-us person dissassemble the 8051 code and take a look at 
whats going on.  With enough work you could even get OpenEC up an 
running.  Which would be funny given that its pretty much halted on the 
OLPC [1].

The Winbond is a RISC based chip.  Much newer and probably harder to 
figure out.

http://www.nuvoton.com/hq/enu/NewsAndEvents/News/ProductAndTechnology/20081003en-1.htm

My .02 would be that you choose one with an EnE chip in it.

---
[1] Nobody has taken up the challenge to reverse engineer the start up 
sequence.  OpenEC boots and runs on the OLPC's KB3700 but the necessary 
info to turn on the voltage regulators is still missing.

-- 
Richard A. Smith
smithbone at gmail.com