Coreboot Lands Support For The HP EliteBook 820 G2

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Coreboot Lands Support For The HP EliteBook 820 G2

The newest motherboard port to land in mainline Coreboot Git is for enabling the HP EliteBook 820 G2 laptop...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Coreboot-HP-Elitebook-820-G2

[OneTimeShot]

How does the ecosystem for BIOS/UEFI work these days. I'd have thought that most chipset manufacturers commit to Coreboot centrally and vendors compile it into their own firmware collection.

Are there other options for getting this stuff? Open or Proprietary? It doesn't seem like an area where there is much value in doing a solution that isn't just a rebadged Coreboot...

[andyprough]

All of the current laptop offerings by System76 have corebooted Intel 13th generation chips, so you certainly don't have to settle for these older chips when it comes to coreboot.

[kenjitamura]

So close

[binarybanana]

How does the ecosystem for BIOS/UEFI work these days. I'd have thought that most chipset manufacturers commit to Coreboot centrally and vendors compile it into their own firmware collection.

Are there other options for getting this stuff? Open or Proprietary? It doesn't seem like an area where there is much value in doing a solution that isn't just a rebadged Coreboot...

Most vendors source their UEFI implementation from third parties, often names known from the good old BIOS days. I think most of these UEFI ”distributions" are based on Intel's reference implementation (the same edk2/ovmf stuff also used on qemu). This way most of the generic hardware support is already taken care of. I don't think coreboot would pass Microsoft certification even with UEFI payload (not sure), but even if it did I imagine having someone to blame when things go wrong is another major reason to go with the conventional options. Inertia is probably another rereason. Custom code for proprietary features, etc. Most would probably work with little/no changes but just figuring this out costs money. I think AMD has some open firmware initiative thing going on but so far it seems to be WiP.

What's really holding adoption back for tinkerers is signed firmware updates. Without the private keys to sign the blob you can't flash your own firmware even if it would technically work if you could. Intel bootguard and whatever AMD does makes things worse yet because flashing the chips directly with a programmer will just brick the machine - the firmware signature is verified to match a key burned into the hardware. Business machines often let you disable this bs though. Don't know about laptops that come with no OS.

[caligula]

So close

Not really, that's multiple generations more recent.

[r1348]

I still have a 755 G2 around, being AMD-based I don't expect coreboot to translate smoothly from one to the other, but one can hope...

[Eirikr1848]

Super dumb question. These laptops unofficially work with 32GB DDR3L-1866 and 16GB DDR3L-2133.

Does Coreboot break that and keep ya at the stock 1600MHz?

i7-5600U = 2C/4T AVX/AVX2
HD 5500 Mobile iGPU (Gen8)

Sooo this works with Intel’s “NEO” and OpenVINO, OneAPI stacks.

Locally one is available with 32GB DDR3L-1866.

Thus: worth picking up for Coreboot?