Coreboot Gets Ported To The Lenovo X230 Ultrabook

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Coreboot Gets Ported To The Lenovo X230 Ultrabook

The latest Lenovo device picking up unofficial support for booting with Coreboot is the X230...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTU3OTM

[FLHerne]

X201, X230...if I'm lucky, they'll get around to this X200 before I need a new laptop.

[ua=42]

It would be really nice if they had an application that you could run that would check to see if the chip-sets on your motherboard are theoretically supported and display whether or not someone else has reported success.

[Sonadow]

However, among the open issues in using Coreboot on the Lenovo X230 is no S3 suspend support...

What is the point of a laptop again?

[phcoder]

X201 and X230 at FOSDEM

Both X201 and X230 running coreboot will be shown at FOSDEM 2014 (coreboot booth).

[GreatEmerald]

It would be really nice if they had an application that you could run that would check to see if the chip-sets on your motherboard are theoretically supported and display whether or not someone else has reported success.

Doesn't flashrom already have something of the sort?

[brosis]

Is it possible to actually get the amount of hardware tuning that usual BIOS provides (CPU config, PCI/E config, RAM config) via Coreboot?
Because the main point of BIOS is not so booting or checking system, but setting hardware configuration.

It would be really nice if they had an application that you could run that would check to see if the chip-sets on your motherboard are theoretically supported and display whether or not someone else has reported success.

AFAIK such application exists, its Superiotool and can be found on coreboot site.

[staalmannen]

It would be really nice if they had an application that you could run that would check to see if the chip-sets on your motherboard are theoretically supported and display whether or not someone else has reported success.

That and having a preconfigured coreboot "distro" with useful payloads (syslinux?). I have long wanted to try coreboot but been afraid because of the potential problems if something goes wrong.

[phcoder]

Is it possible to actually get the amount of hardware tuning that usual BIOS provides (CPU config, PCI/E config, RAM config) via Coreboot?

coreboot has some number of options. But additionally since you have the *source* you can modify to do anything.

AFAIK such application exists, its Superiotool and can be found on coreboot site.

Superiotool is just to communicate with Super I/O which isn't even present on all boards. If the board is already supported then it's in the list of supported boards. If it's not then to estimate how hard it would be to port to it, you should look into its documentation and compare with already supported boards.

[zanny]

Is it possible to actually get the amount of hardware tuning that usual BIOS provides (CPU config, PCI/E config, RAM config) via Coreboot

Coreboot itself doesn't provide any interactivity at runtime, but you can use a seabios payload or another configuration tool to modify hardware state.

In theory, though, the even better option would be for linux to be coreboot-aware enough to be able to write into the firmware modifications from userspace to set this stuff, so you can tweak your voltages / cpufreq / ram timings from a live system. I figure the only real safeguard you'd want like that is if you have 3 failed boots in a row or something it resets to the defaults so it can cleanly boot.