[coreboot] Possible support for Lippert Cool LiteRunner

[Carl-Daniel Hailfinger]

On 12.03.2008 06:53, Martin Trautmann wrote:
> Jordan Crouse wrote:
>   
>> There are some other people on this list who are also interested in
>> supporting the GX and 5535, I'll let them speak up.
>>     
>
> Here I am. Personally, I got some major trouble how to understand coreboot:
>
> - Migration from v2 to v3: Is there any help and docu how code should be 
> ported from v2 to v3 - or is v3 that much cleaner (that means completely 
> new and different) so that it would be better to write new code from 
> scratch?
>   

Reading the design document in the v3 tree and the mainboard specific
code for one mainboard will give you a pretty good overview of the v3
structure (and to some extent, code quality).
The architecture of v3 is completely different from v2 and porting means
a lot of refactoring. Depending on how baroque the old code is, you
might want to work from existing v3 code instead (this is especially
true for GX and CS5535 code).

> - Hardware info: would I need the circuit plans of a board in order to 
> know what is available? I got e.g. several ports on my board which could 
> be GPIO, LPC, LVDS, ...
>   

In theory, all those settings should be done in the mainboard dts.
However, there may be some settings which can not yet be done in the dts
and the recommended course of action would be to make them dts-aware.
Having board schematics eases porting somewhat, but most of the board
bringup (except specialized functions like those you mentioned and IRQ
routing) should be easily doable without schematics.

> - BIOS decompiler: Is there any BIOS decompiler which would tell me the 
> current operations which have to be done?
>   

There are some tools to analyze proprietary BIOS images, but the person
doing the analysis is not allowed to use the results to write code
because it would violate clean room principles. The best advice I can
give is to avoid touching/analyzing proprietary BIOS code/images,
especially if hardware documentation is readily available.

Regards,
Carl-Daniel

-- 
http://www.hailfinger.org/