Another Older ASUS Board Now Works With Coreboot, Can Be Found Refurbished $50~70

[flubba86]

There's usually a list of caveats on an article like this.

"This 11 year old board now works with Coreboot! How progressive! However you cannot boot from a USB drive, if you increase the audio volume greater than 1% it only comes out of the left channel, the PCI-E 16x slot operates at 1x, it you use the sleep function it wipes the CMOS, the onboard video output displays inverted colours."

This article seems devoid of these however.

[andyprough]

If you go the Intel route make sure you got a SPI flash programmer and possibly a 1.8V adapter to work with it on low-power SPI chips (in case the one on your board is low-power).

Also having hot air smd rework station does not hurt, as in many cases you can't flash them while soldered on the board with just a SOIC clip.

Don't forget to stand on and be clipped into the anti-static mat. And a clean room bunny suit might come in handy, along with a clean room air filter that can get down to 100 or less ppm.

[starshipeleven]

Don't forget to stand on and be clipped into the anti-static mat. And a clean room bunny suit might come in handy, along with a clean room air filter that can get down to 100 or less ppm.

Doing any kind of board firmware modifications can end badly, modding the ME increases the chance. Not being prepared for that is foolish.
If the PC does not boot or boots in a broken state, the only sure way to recover it is to flash manually a backup of the stock firmware.

But if you like to risk throwing away a board (plus the downtime of the PC) just because you don't want to invest 100$ in reusable tools (and I'm including a chinese hot air rework station here, the hardware flashers and the 1.8v adapters and the clips are cheap, you can get quality ones with 25$), be my guest. The first time something goes wrong it repays itself, and given how it's going in the x86 world, you will need to use the me_cleaner in any new Intel PC you will buy for the rest of your life.

It's not my fault if many board manufacturers do tricks that keep the chip in reset or read only mode if you try to program it in-circuit.

[slalomsk8er]

Don't forget to stand on and be clipped into the anti-static mat. And a clean room bunny suit might come in handy, along with a clean room air filter that can get down to 100 or less ppm.

Wrong article? We are talking about flash chips not transferring platters from one HDD to an other.

[schmidtbag]

Intel develops TianoCore on GitHub.
My next computer will be an Intel, it will not be an AMD.

AMD need to step up their game. Get rid of proprietary firmware and binary blobs, and make more open source and publish more documentation.

You do realize that even if you get Coreboot, you're still not getting a fully open-source system, right? Unless you actually have a good reason to want 100% open-source (and I'm confident you don't, because every time I bring it up you have yet to come up with one) you might as well just get what actually suits your needs, because neither company will satisfy your principles. Otherwise, you ought to just give up on x86 and move to another architecture. Seeing as you want a complete FLOSS platform, that should be no problem to you, since you can just re-compile whatever doesn't exist.

[reavertm]

I have P8P67 Deluxe, so close, just not there yet.
I wish Asus released code for their UEFI, perhaps someone would fix booting in UEFI mode when more than one disk is plugged in..

[uid313]

You do realize that even if you get Coreboot, you're still not getting a fully open-source system, right? Unless you actually have a good reason to want 100% open-source (and I'm confident you don't, because every time I bring it up you have yet to come up with one) you might as well just get what actually suits your needs, because neither company will satisfy your principles. Otherwise, you ought to just give up on x86 and move to another architecture. Seeing as you want a complete FLOSS platform, that should be no problem to you, since you can just re-compile whatever doesn't exist.

Yes, I do realize that.
I don't have any good reason to have a 100% open source system. It is just a personal preference. I am into that kind of stuff. It's a fetish I have.
I am on Intel right now and is likely to stay, if AMD want to sway me, then open source is what it's at.

[mulenmar]

Yes, I do realize that.
I don't have any good reason to have a 100% open source system. It is just a personal preference. I am into that kind of stuff. It's a fetish I have.
I am on Intel right now and is likely to stay, if AMD want to sway me, then open source is what it's at.

You might want to keep an eye on the eoma68 project, then. Considerably cheaper than the Talos II.

[Th3Fanbus]

As the person behind this board port, and given I rather new to coreboot, I greatly appreciate this article.
I have to point out a small detail about it, though. There are two versions of the board I ported, the retail P8H61-M PRO I did the port for and the P8H61-M PRO/cm6630-8/dp_mb, which is an OEM part used in an Asus Essentio prebuilt computer. The article shows a picture of the latter. While it is not a major issue since both boards are rather similar, I wanted to point out this difference. The most notorious changes are that my board does not have spare DDR3 solder pads and does not have a legacy PCI slot. Instead, it has a second PCI-E x16 slot.

There's usually a list of caveats on an article like this.

"This 11 year old board now works with Coreboot! How progressive! However you cannot boot from a USB drive, if you increase the audio volume greater than 1% it only comes out of the left channel, the PCI-E 16x slot operates at 1x, it you use the sleep function it wipes the CMOS, the onboard video output displays inverted colours."

This article seems devoid of these however.

As the one who worked on this board, I have to say this is completely nonsense:
- This board is not 11 years old. It is at most 7 years old, since it has a B3 revision chipset (http://event.asus.com/2011/mb/Identify_B3_Motherboards/).
- Booting from USB drives works fine with both SeaBIOS and Tianocore.
- Audio channels do not fail like that. And it has been tested.
- The board I have has two PCI-E X16 slots in size, the first one works as X16 properly and the second one runs as X1 even with the original BIOS (hardware does not have more PCI-E lines, it is also present on the mainboard specs page: https://www.asus.com/Motherboards/P8...pecifications/).
- S3 sleep is working properly and the CMOS does not reset just because the computer goes in and out of S3.
- The onboard video works well with both libgfxinit and a VBIOS.

This article does not have an extensive list of caveats simply because there are next to none. It does mention the issues SATA ports have, though. I do not find them to be rather serious. The ASM1061 SATA III controller, which is not detected from the payloads but works fine once an OS has loaded, used to hang the boot process by spuriously advertising ASPM support. Two other people reported issues with it as well, and patches #25617 and #25619 were created to address this problem. Said controller is also limited by hardware (PCI-E X1) to 400 MB/s no matter how fast the disks attached to it are, and this is not on a per-disk basis. Regarding Tianocore, another mainboard with the same chipset I could reproduce the issue on does not fail anymore when I re-tested it a few days ago, which means it is no longer an issue.

In short, I find this comment defamatory and offensive. I hope this reply clears out any possible confusion the comment it replies to may have caused.

[mulenmar]

As the one who worked on this board, I have to say this is completely nonsense:
- This board is not 11 years old. It is at most 7 years old, since it has a B3 revision chipset (http://event.asus.com/2011/mb/Identify_B3_Motherboards/).
- Booting from USB drives works fine with both SeaBIOS and Tianocore.
- Audio channels do not fail like that. And it has been tested.
- The board I have has two PCI-E X16 slots in size, the first one works as X16 properly and the second one runs as X1 even with the original BIOS (hardware does not have more PCI-E lines, it is also present on the mainboard specs page: https://www.asus.com/Motherboards/P8...pecifications/).
- S3 sleep is working properly and the CMOS does not reset just because the computer goes in and out of S3.
- The onboard video works well with both libgfxinit and a VBIOS.
...

In short, I find this comment defamatory and offensive. I hope this reply clears out any possible confusion the comment it replies to may have caused.

Thanks for your hard work. This forum is full of bitter trolls, and Coreboot is one of the top ten candidates.