[coreboot] Current status of WYSE S50 support

[Oliver Schinagl]

Having put off to reply, this may be a reason to do so once more :)

I have 5 or 6 Wyse S10 (which are very very similar to the S50's) 
thinclients with 1gb 'disk-on-chip' IDE disks and 256MB Ram (over the 
stock 128mb ram and no d-o-c, e.g. using bios only) of which I'm willing 
to donate 1 or even 2 if demand is high enough. I'll cover shipping 
within europe (and other places we can talk) and throw in the 100-240V 
adapter with EU power plug. I'm not skilled enough to do the porting 
myself, unless i'd have loads of help (i know C but no clue where to 
state and little time).

Let me know if your interested, or if there's some other procedure i'd 
have to adhere to when donating 'stuff'.

oliver

On 18-11-11 21:00, Marc Jones wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 16, 2011 at 9:06 AM, JM<fijam at archlinux.us>  wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> I am interested in replacing the BIOS on WYSE S50 with coreboot. I
>> have browsed the mailing list archives, however, some of the reports
>> are a bit unclear. I'd appreciate if someone could shed some light on
>> the following concerns of mine:
>>
>> 1. Does the board work after RAMBASE rework (i.e. is ticket #163 really fixed)?
>>
>> 2. Is the current support of this board sufficient to boot Linux? More
>> specifically, I have come across some reports of broken vsa and acpi,
>> is this still an issue? If so, how does the lack of those features
>> affect normal Linux operation?
>>
>> 3. When booting Linux from USB using default manufacturer's BIOS the
>> ATA port is being disabled. Is this a software or hardware limitation?
>> In other words, if I boot from USB with coreboot/SeaBIOS would I have
>> ATA enabled?
>>
>> 4. When I boot the Linux kernel with the default BIOS it occasionally
>> hangs on initializing the PCI subsystem. Is this a result of a bug in
>> vsa code (virtualized pci) or BIOS? Does the problem persist with
>> coreboot/SeaBIOS and AMD's vsa? I noticed something called OpenVSA,
>> does it support Geode GX?
>>
>> 5. Can I help in any way with the development not being a programmer?
>>
>> Thanks,
>> JM
> Hi JM,
>
> It has been some time since anyone has worked on Geode. You may have
> to try it to find out. Before you do, make sure you have a way to
> recover the BIOS image.
>
> It is dated and the build process has changed, but you should read the
> geode porting page. It talks about VSA and graphics and stuff. The VSA
> was openned and used on the OLPC project. It requires the Microsoft
> tools to build and no one has ported it to gcc yet. There is a link to
> the binary on the geode page. You should stop by the IRC #coreboot if
> you need a hand building coreboot.
>
> http://www.coreboot.org/AMD_Geode_Porting_Guide
>
> Marc
>
> --
> http://se-eng.com
>