[coreboot] Dell latitude c610

[Uwe Hermann]

Hi,

On Fri, Jun 26, 2009 at 12:33:14PM +0200, CybFr wrote:
> I'd like to re-open a tread from Michal Janke about supporting Dell latitude 
> C610 and its SMSC LPC47N252 SuperIO.
> 
> - I've found the closest chip from SMSC was FDC37N972, supported by 
> superiotool so I added corresponding entries in smsc.c.
> 
> - for  FDC, UARTS, KBD, RTC, everything seems quite common so I added it in 
> /superio/smsc/smsssuperio/superio.c.
> (the big difference betweenn supported smsc chips an LPC47N252 is the 
> EC-8051 core... )
> 
> What could be the next step ?

Well, that's the million dollar question. We don't yet support _any_
laptop in coreboot exactly because of the EC problems (well, among other
problems).

Luckily, the LPC47N252 datasheet seems to contain some amount of info
about the EC, so maybe it's doable. However, we don't know too much
about this stuff at this point. Chipset is 830MP which should be doable,
so all in all this might be a reasonably well-suited laptop if you want
to invest some time and energy into coreboot on this laptop.

I'm also trying to do something similar with an ancient 440BX laptop
here, see http://www.coreboot.org/Dell_Latitude_CPi_A366XT, but I
haven't gotten very far, yet.

First thing you should do is to get a known-good backup image of your
current BIOS, flash that on a different chip and see if the laptop still
boots with that. Until this works, I wouldn't recommend to proceed.

Is this a PLCC chip, and is it in a socket or soldered onto the board?
If soldered, do you have equipment and skills to desolder it and put on
a socket? See http://www.coreboot.org/Soldering_a_socket_on_your_board
for PLCC sockets, for other types of chips it may be a bit harder.

Can you make high-res pictures of the whole laptop board (front and back
side etc, especially of the Super I/O / EC? We can put those in the wiki
also if you want to release them under a freeish license (CC, public
domain, etc).

The next step would probably be to find out where the EC code lives in
the flash ROM chip, make a coreboot.rom which leaves that area empty
and then 'dd' the EC blob over the empty area. Flash that, attach a POST
card and/or null-modem cable and see what happens...

Anyway, if you have any superiotool or superio/smsc/smsssuperio/superio.c
patches which are generic and could be reused for other stuff, please post
them with a Signed-off-by so we can commit them, see
http://www.coreboot.org/Development_Guidelines#Sign-off_Procedure


Cheers, Uwe.
-- 
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