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

[Joseph Smith]

On Wed, 15 Apr 2009 17:40:56 -0500, <Ken.Fuchs at bench.com> wrote:
> bari wrote:
>
>> There are several i945 + Atom boards available. This way you can
>> develop and test Atom on a working chipset and then work on the
>> US15W.
>
> In my opinion, porting US15W may not be worthwhile, since it doesn't
> support the SPI bus which would allow use of SPI NOR flash.  US15W
> supports FWH which Intel has already obsoleted, although It may have
> contracted with third parties to supply FWH devices for this chip set.
>
> Also, this chipset almost requires an embedded controller to handle
> power and translate between FWH and SPI bus to support SPI NOR devices.
> Intel does offer a CPLD solution that avoids the use of the embedded
> controller, but the CPLD would only permit reading of the SPI NOR
> flash and absolutely no writing of it.
>
> The US15W also has it own microcode updating that the BIOS/firmware
> must support.
>
> The i945/ICH7M would be a far better final target for an Atom chipset
> and has none of the above mentioned issues.  Of course you would need
> to use Diamondville Atom rather Silverthorne Atom in this case.
>
> Good luck with your Poulsbo (US15W) port, assuming you are willing to
> spend 6-9 months on it.  It could be more or less than that depending
> on the number of people working on it and their firmware experience.
>
Hey this is not very encouraging but very discouraging:-(
But I'm sure Albert Einstein heard heard things like this every day!
Mansoor, if you want to develop coreboot support for the Atom, I say go for
it :-)

-- 
Thanks,
Joseph Smith
Set-Top-Linux
www.settoplinux.org