Mainboards supported by coreboot | Hacker News Reader

Mainboards supported by coreboot

coreboot.org

FYI, the script over at mrchromebox.tech used to liberate Chromebooks and Chromeboxes so they can host Linux and other OSes can also install Coreboot. I've used it on a good number of such machines without any problems.

https://mrchromebox.tech

I have used it too, it’s great, the maintainer is very active on Reddit supporting people seeking to dechrome their chromebooks.

I bought a Chromebook for $89 in 2014, and I still use it every single day thanks to this guy.

I blew away the stock firmware on an old Acer 720P chromebook with mrchromebook.tech's coreboot and it's awesome running arch and XFCE or i3.

I have a few pcengine apu-2 routers and one of their most underrated features is that they use coreboot.

It is hard to quantify exactly why this is nice, but I will try. I think it is because you now have a situation where because the whole toolchain is public there can be no magic in it. so the firmware and the flashing process feels more solid and predictable than most other firmware. specificly, I run openbsd on mine and flashrom has no problem updating the firmware[1]. a very unsupported configuration. I will probably never need to build my own firmware but I really like knowing that I could.

1. The trick to flashing firmware on openbsd is understanding that openbsd as part of it's normal boot shuts off a lot of memory access(sysctl kern.securelevel). so the easiest way is boot into single user mode so flashrom can write to the correct memory addresses.

I used to use openbsd on my apu-2, but since I upgraded to a gigabit wan connection I had to move to Linux as I just couldn't make it do line speed gigabit :((

Did you have any success?

I usually max out at ~700 mbps running the latest version of OpenBSD. A trade-off I'm willing to take, but others may not.

>1. The trick to flashing firmware on openbsd is understanding that openbsd as part of it's normal boot shuts off a lot of memory access(sysctl kern.securelevel). so the easiest way is boot into single user mode so flashrom can write to the correct memory addresses.

This is an excellent point! Flashrom + runlevel 1 in most linux/unix'es = best chance to read/write BIOS/(U)EFI ((E)EP)ROM/flash...

Also, +1 for OpenBSD.

It would be really helpful for takes like this to have a date column.

I really dislike when links are to a blog post or page that doesn't have a way of navigating to the main site. Needing to manually modify the URL is enough of an annoyance on mobile that I'm more likely to bounce.

coreboot.org

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