Coreboot Ported To A ~$30 AMD AM1 Motherboard

[cb88]

Thank you for your insight, however why do you say HDMI sucks?

Yeah I could care less about arguing with him about if I did my research or not when he doesn't even know that the VGA on this board does not work. Now if that is a firmware issue only and coreboot fixes it woot but that is extremely doubtful. I could careless about manufacturer as well everybody makes duds.... Reason I say Asus is their board can over clock for sure to between 2.5-3ghz which is much needed for this chip.

[drSeehas]

PCIe slots

... one PCI Express 2.0 slot ...

I can see two PCI Express slots.

But only 100 MB/s Ethernet: No-go.

[Adarion]

Yeah I could care less about arguing with him about if I did my research or not when he doesn't even know that the VGA on this board does not work. Now if that is a firmware issue only and coreboot fixes it woot but that is extremely doubtful. I could careless about manufacturer as well everybody makes duds.... Reason I say Asus is their board can over clock for sure to between 2.5-3ghz which is much needed for this chip.

Let me see. VGA not working? This is one opinion from one person. Maybe he got a "monday's work" / lemon car. But then, doing further research, this V. Randal guy generally has a low opinion of about everything:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A2FJMQ0CFYXPS5/

So it is hard to judge about a piece of HW if just one person rates it like that, especially when this person rates a lot of things negatively.

I tried the VGA with the AM1MHP (which is a very similar board) and it works. One should be careful just to judge upon one opinion. This one review can be a fact, it can be a paid review by the manufacturer itself, paid by the competitors and it could be somebody who just handled the device wrong. Or something else.
Furthermore graphic problems might also be inherited from the APU, doesn't have to be the mainboard's fault always. Faulty cables, monitor inputs and so on. Computers are complex and a lot of things can go wrong. So I would not be so sure and say the VGA is generally defective on all Biostar boards.

If you think you need to overclock a Kabini chip to 3 GHz, well, okay, that's your cup of tea. But I wouldn't see the main purpose of neither Kabini nor Atom, Celeron and what they are called in overclocking and numbercrunching. So far I am happy with an Athlon 5350 and even compiling libreoffice isn't a real pain here.

[Adarion]

Thank you for your insight, however why do you say HDMI sucks?

For some reasons. Once we had VGA in a D-Sub physical interface. A working standard. Then people suddenly though graphics quality was bad and we need to go digital, because digital is good. (Well, I had a very nice, sharp and colour rich picture on my VGA-BNC driven CRT. And it was FAST. And it had no native resolution, just a max resolution. Unlike all the TFT stuff that was to come and with it also digital inputs.)
DVI was just getting aroung to be widely implemented and working. It also had an analog option so that was some kind of backward compatibility.
And then we needed more physical interfaces, all more or less incompatible with each other. DP and HDMI hit the market and with HDMI came HDCP. We don't really have to discuss that HDCP is bad in a freedom software related forum, do we?
Later they made even more different interfaces, mini HDMI. More Adapters needed. And even less solid. I understand that people want now even video ouit on their flat smartphones, but I prefer solid connectors. And HDMI does not allow a lot of adapters to other formats. Some convertors are expensive. Often it is limited to some strange 16:9 resolutions. Versions are not compatible with each other sometimes, so you have to buy new equipment.
Also I wonder what they need Ethernet for in the more recent versions of HDMI. Umm, maybe it is used in these Smart-TVs that spy on people.

[Adarion]

I can see two PCI Express slots.

But only 100 MB/s Ethernet: No-go.

You won't be seeing many alternatives soon, I fear. Most modern boards use SuperIOs that just do not work with Linux/Unix. (kernel, lm_sensors, flashrom, coreboot)
So there might be 1000 Mbit onboard NICs out there but chances that you can run coreboot on that mainboard are not the best.

[kingu]

Thats a picture of a mini-ITX form-factor board, not Micro-ATX. Am i missing something?

[drSeehas]

You won't be seeing many alternatives soon, I fear. Most modern boards use SuperIOs that just do not work with Linux/Unix. (kernel, lm_sensors, flashrom, coreboot)
...

So you want to say Biostar uses a different SuperIO on the sister mainboard AM1MH (which has a Realtek RTL8111G 10/100/1000 ethernet controller)?
Why would Biostar do this?

[drSeehas]

Thats a picture of a mini-ITX form-factor board, not Micro-ATX. Am i missing something?

Yes, you are missing something.
From the Biostar page

http://www.biostar.com.tw/app/en/mb/introduction.php?S_ID=695#spec

"Micro ATX Form Factor Dimension: 19.1 cm x 17 cm ( W x L )"
Mini-ITX form-factor is 17 cm ? 17 cm.

[GI_Jack]

EFI

I'm probably the only person who is wondering when people start taking EFI, and perhaps tianocore seriously.

But anyways, its good to see more boards in coreboot, especially more modernish ones. They have a tendency to focus on laptops, which is fine, but motherboards would be easier, given no embedded controllers, screens, and if one or two the perephrials don't work, there are PCI/PCI-E alternatvies that should, so long as PCI is working. Available are foss friendly, ethernet, sound, wifi, etc..

[curaga]

Tendency to focus on laptops? With something like a hundred mobos supported and like two laptops? (not counting ChromeBooks)