[coreboot] Patch set to add support for AMD based laptop HP Pavilion m6-1035dx up for review

[mrnuke]

On Friday, March 28, 2014 10:03:28 AM Paul Menzel wrote:
> Dear coreboot folks,
> 
> 
> Alexandru put wood behind the arrow to get coreboot running on an AMD
> based laptop. He took his old HP Pavilion m6-1035dx [1] and in a
> day/night had coreboot running on it and he submitted the patch set for
> review [2]!
> 
Heh! Thanks for the enthusiasm, Paul. I was able to merge this earlier today., 
so people can start playing around with it.

The hardware in this laptop will eat chromebooks alive performance-wise, and 
does not have essential, non-replaceable, persistent blobs. I think all the 
blobs still present could be replaced with free alternatives after some 
reasonable effort.

I am surprised just how portable the AMD hardware is, as opposed to <evil 
competitor>. The blobs we're dealing with here are chipset-specific, as 
opposed to board-specific, as is the case of <evil competitor>. This makes 
them much less intrusive on the porting process, almost transparent.

> Congrats to being, to my knowledge, the first to get coreboot running on
> an AMD based laptop! Also big thanks to AMD and Sage Electronic
> Engineering LLC [3] for providing code and support for AMD stuff! Also
> thanks to Google for contributing code for the COMPAL ENE932 Embedded
> Controller [4].
> 
I could not have done it if those pieces weren't in place. Having coreboot run 
on an AMD laptop is really exciting for me. I has been disheartening to see 
how AMD is helping us, but most of our bright minds defect to hardware which 
is more restricted and unnecessarily harder to deal with.

> So reviewers and help in getting the non-working stuff to work are
> greatly appreciated.
> 
ACPI is the bigger issue here. Suspend/resume needs work, as does the battery 
indicator, and some hot-keys.

> Bad for Alex that he now has to deal with AGESA and get for example
> CBMEM console working with it for romstage or to refactor the code to be
> more maintainable. :P
> 
There was plenty of less-than-perfect code which sneaked in along the years, 
albeit I am glad we have it. I will only touch fam15tn part of AGESA, as I can 
test the changes and avoid breaking hardware I do not own.

There are some circular dependencies here and there, and a definite abuse of 
compiler include paths. This confuses code editors, and makes development 
harder, as you first have to figure out which file is included. I'll be 
working briefly to address these, and, as you put it, make "the code to be
more maintainable".

My motivation for doing this is not to get coreboot to run on this laptop. The 
laptop itself is poorly constructed. I do, however, want to lay the groundwork 
for the LTS laptop everyone's been talking about.

I also have some ARM laptops due to arrive, so I'll also focus on getting 
those up to speed.

Alex