[coreboot] Porting coreboot to Intel Atom (Silverthorne) & SCH US15W (Poulsbo) chipset

[Peter Stuge]

Hello Mansoor, welcome to the coreboot community!


Mansoor wrote:
> I  have a Atom Silverthorne Poulsbo based board 
> (http://www.iwavesystems.com/iW-Q7.htm).
> I want to port coreboot on this platform.

That's wonderful!


> I would like to know if anybody has started/suceeded in porting
> coreboot to Atom,

I do not think anyone has.


> also if there is anyone interested in such a port.

I would say that there is a lot of interest. There are certainly many
possible uses for such a port. And it will also be very valuable for
the community to learn about embedded Intel hardware which is so far
not so well understood here.


> If anyone can suggest/guide me in following, it will be helpful in
> getting started in right track.
>
> 1)Which version of coreboot can be used (v2 or v3) ?

That is a good question. I find v3 much easier to understand, but it
is still in design testing phase, and so far it only really works on
AMD Geode LX.

The most effort is coming into the v2 codebase, it is more tested,
but it is more difficult to penetrate.


> 2)Which platform (CPU,motherboard,EC) can be taken as reference ?

I do not have specific knowledge about Silverthorne Poulsbo, but I
understand that they introduce some new things into the x86 power
management domain.

As for a basic platform I think VIA CN700 is clean hardware-wise, but
I have not spent a lot of time with the code. There is support for
the VIA EPIA-CN mainboard for example.

AMD Geode LX is another option, but it has it's oddities which may or
may not fit with how Silverthorne Poulsbo works. There is support for
the PC Engines ALIX.1 mainboard for example. (alix1c in coreboot, but
will run also on alix1d hardware.)

As for EC I don't think there is really any code in coreboot at
present. :\

Some simple EC things have gone into superio code because that's
where we've encountered them so far, but we don't have a good EC
infrastructure.

There has been discussion about starting an OpenEC project, and I
think that is a good idea, but so far there hasn't been a lot of
resources.

The latest progress in power management is the infrastructure added
to coreboot ACPI by Rudolf Marek just the last few days, to do S3
well. Rudolf has been working on AMD64 hardware.

We will help you, but we are also very open even to fundamental
suggestions.


//Peter