Another Old Intel Motherboard Gets Picked Up By Coreboot

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Another Old Intel Motherboard Gets Picked Up By Coreboot

If you still are running Intel i945 era hardware, you may be happy to know another motherboard from this time is now supported by mainline Coreboot...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...-GA-945GCM-S2L

[starshipeleven]

sometimes I wonder if someone is adding support to this stuff just for lulz.

It is at least still usable hardware and may still be available second-hand or something, but it's kind of meh.

[mulenmar]

sometimes I wonder if someone is adding support to this stuff just for lulz.

It is at least still usable hardware and may still be available second-hand or something, but it's kind of meh.

Core 2 Duo CPUs, which this board supports, are still quite sufficient for many tasks. I'm more worried about the DDR2 ram -- remember that method of cooling the ram and swapping it to another computer to read out the keys? I'm pretty sure that doesn't work on anything newer, but it does with DDR2. :/

Energy efficiency of the hardware is also an issue, of course.

[starshipeleven]

Core 2 Duo CPUs, which this board supports, are still quite sufficient for many tasks.

I know, I said "usable".

I'm more worried about the DDR2 ram -- remember that method of cooling the ram and swapping it to another computer to read out the keys? I'm pretty sure that doesn't work on anything newer, but it does with DDR2. :/

That's a desktop board, the issue is for laptops mostly as doing this on a desktop while unnoticed is a bit harder.

You can also wire case sensors to shut down the system if the case is opened, for added fun.

Energy efficiency of the hardware is also an issue, of course.

Again, it is a desktop.

[Sluthy]

My main PC was built in '08 and is almost due for an upgrade - the 8GB RAM ceiling is really my only limit if I'm honest. The motherboard is a GA-EP35-DS3P which is two years newer than this one (ICH9R southbridge etc) but hopefully not much more work for Coreboot/Libreboot support, so I could buy an all-new Kaby Lake setup for work/play and keep my current tower going as a test bed for all things libre (it already has a GTX750, which IIRC with blobless re-clocking is the current fastest "Stallman-approved" GPU).

[phoron]

(it already has a GTX750, which IIRC with blobless re-clocking is the current fastest "Stallman-approved" GPU).

Excuse me, but how does video decode work ? If I read nouveau web right Nvidia GForce GTX750 should be a NV110 without free video acceleration.
I'm interested in what blobless, 100% free software video acceleration is there (decoding at least, if encoding too, much the better). Since Intel GPUs require Intel CPUs and ME, etc. (unless old) that rules them out. AMD/ATI has Proprietary AtomBIOS, I think, and nouveau requires blobs for most hardware video decoding, unless for old cards (NV40?).
But I may be misunderstanding it.

Thank you.

[Uqbar]

Working on mb that are older than 4 years not only is a waste of time and resources, but also shows that there is little care to a roadmap.
What'd be the result in supporting a mb you cannot buy? And even if you could, would you be able to make anything useful?

If so, then go ahead: I have a Compaq Desktop 386 with 4 mb ram and 40 mb disk I can devote to the cause. The cause of nonsense.

[phoron]

Working on mb that are older than 4 years not only is a waste of time and resources, but also shows that there is little care to a roadmap.

Well, or you may not care about the developers' roadmap. Color me decrepit, but I I for one find that new does not mean better. New means untested, unproven and equally possibly better than worse. In fact there's a chance that if people have put work in making something new, they're trying to do it better than what was there, but better for whom, precisely ?
New motherboards may be less electricity hungry and more performant, but they are almost always less versatile, more risky and less and less under the owner control.
So one may be interested in old offerings.

What'd be the result in supporting a mb you cannot buy?

People may decide the offers you can buy are too restricted and vulnerable to outside control to be worth buying. Then one has two options. You can manufacture and sell better options or you can put your work to try to add value to older options. The latter requires less investment. If you can't buy a hardware factory but you can code, you can use the ancient hardware to compete with the new hardware even from the same manufacturer. If you decide that the abuses that DRM and treacherous computing is bringinging on the public is not acceptable, you may want to do something to try to stop the abusers from selling so much. Supporting older hardware is a right step. It's not just a passive boycot as in I won't buy from companies that alienate their customers. It's an active I'm not going to buy but I'm going to help a little others to be able to not buy either (do you say "either" or "too" here, in English ???).

And even if you could, would you be able to make anything useful?

You should be able to do as many useful things as when people were buying the same product as new. If you can't then it's because there's social pressure on forcing people to change working hardware for newer hardware. You may not want to be part of that social pressure and decide to stick to older hardware. We may all be upset at bloatware, heavyweight web pages, and centralised services but as long as we succumb to them we become accomplices.

If so, then go ahead: I have a Compaq Desktop 386 with 4 mb ram and 40 mb disk I can devote to the cause. The cause of nonsense.

Consumism is much more nonsense than reuse. But we're fallng in a trap. People collaborating in a project don't have to have 100% aligned goals. There does not nned to be a single roadmap. Coreboot roadmap would be decided by Google if there had to be a single roadmap. Because their chromebooks are possibly the biggest contribution to the codebase. Not even they are so foolish to stop anyone with different roadmaps to contribute. Why should them ? MMM... I going to shut up just in case I'm motivating them to "do be evil".

[starshipeleven]

New motherboards may be less electricity hungry and more performant, but they are almost always less versatile, more risky and less and less under the owner control.
So one may be interested in old offerings.

Note that this is COREboot, not LIBREboot. While I personally agree with nuking UEFI in every shape and form (not that it is the case here), Coreboot isn't offering more than stock BIOS in the way of user control.

People may decide the offers you can buy are too restricted and vulnerable to outside control to be worth buying. Then one has two options. You can manufacture and sell better options or you can put your work to try to add value to older options. The latter requires less investment.

Retro-fitting old shit is a stop-gap AT BEST. If you don't have a clear way forward you're just making sure you get THROUGHLY fucked sideways sometime in the future as you missed all lower-hanging opportunities and when you will have to upgrade eventually you will have to bridge an even wider gap.

Supporting older hardware is a right step. It's not just a passive boycot as in I won't buy from companies that alienate their customers. It's an active I'm not going to buy but I'm going to help a little others to be able to not buy either (do you say "either" or "too" here, in English ???).

Complete and utter bullshit. The amount of people interested in Corebooting their motherboards is exceedingly slim, there is pretty much no damage done to The Man.

Consumism is much more nonsense than reuse.

Technically speaking, no.

Consumism allows to drop prices massively in many fields. It is various orders of magnitude cheaper to just replace whole a complex high-tech component than trying to fix it with many days/weeks of electronics/mechanical troubleshooting, allowing higher uptimes and less costs for all.
You have no fucking idea of how complex affairs like PCs would cost if they weren't mass-produced so hard.

Consumism if channeled correctly would allow to feed all poor and destitute with the ludicrous amounts of wasted foodstuff that are discarded, and in many places this is happening already.

Simple reuse isn't doing anything near that. Let's not throw away the child with the water. Mismanaged Consumism is bad, but Consumerism is the biggest force you can harness to get anywhere currently, hippe bullshit remains such and never got anyone anywhere.

Coreboot roadmap would be decided by Google if there had to be a single roadmap.

Coreboot proper is ported to various boards, board support is a leaf project, not really crucial for the parent.

[Uqbar]

I cannot change consumerism. None of us can.

I'd like to buy my favorite 25 asa 35mm film for my Ricoh and shoot those 36 frames. But I cannot any more. So I don't waste time and resources in film development, even if those pictures were way better than any digital shot you can do today.

You can go on discussing. Those MBs, CPUs, Simms and PSUs are not available any more. Those are archaeology. That computing power is a fraction of that of my smartphone. It's possible that it cannot run 4.x kernels.
It's likely it's junk.

I still think that all those resources, and valuable ones, are just wasted.