Leandro Dorileo

I found these photos on flickr, people hacking coreboot. Coreboot Summit - Denver, 2008.

My table arrangement was inspired by some photos from this set. A cut basket with motherboard over it and the power supplier under. Of course my setup is a bit more organized than the the people`s in Denver(well it was a Summit).

ps: this is also a “note to myself” since I may want to show these photos to someone else;

Another monday and I need to write a gsoc-update. It`s two weeks after my last update, I coulnd`t write an update last week since I hadn`t a good progress.

I suppose every body could notice the problems based on the emails I sent to the project`s mentors. I faced problems to run coreboot on my real hardware.

One week later - now - I run coreboot successfully on a real hardware. To express the happenings a bit better I need to tell a kind of story.

• Flashed coreboot but didn`t get any vga output(did everything correctly but no vga output - now I understand I was doing all right, but wasn`t sure that time);
• Couldn`t understand why no vga output, went to IRC and asked some questions, some one told me I needed a video rom prepended to my coreboot final image;
• Asked Jason if he used to prepend a video rom and he confirmed, in that time I thought I should do the same;
• Reading the coreboot wiki I learnt how to extract a video rom, not hard, but started to try to prepend it to coreboot;
• I couldn`t understand the semantics behind ROM_SIZE, ROM_IMAGE_SIZE and few other configurations, started to test many combinations. needed to learn and understand how the many ways to build a coreboot image work;
• Went to source code of buildrom to understand what and how it does, learned it just merges coreboot and the payload;
• Learnt there`s no reason to have a coreboot image without a payload, so don`t even try to have a coreboot image without a payload, it doesn`t make any sense;
• Learnt I can use cbfs to build the coreboot image, but not every targets uses it, discovered a bug on cbfstool but didn`t get the chance and time to dig on it;
• After many tries I understood I couldn`t make any progress without a serial cable and a serial console set up, went to buy a cable and after some time I could see coreboot was being loaded but no vga output;
• Noticed whatever payload I used it wasn`t being loaded
• Felt weird the output on my serial console and asked Carl-Daniel to take a look, after some time trying to discover the problem Uwe Hermann appeared on IRC, he asked me if I installed my single memory module on DIMM_B1 slot;
• I felt it so obvious, and didn`t think this could be my problem once the Award Bios was running properly;
• Moved the memory module from DIMM_B2 to DIMM_B1 and immediately the payload was loaded and I could see vga output;
• Uwe Hermann told me I didn`t need to prepend a vga rom to coreboot since my motherboard doesn`t have an onboard vga(in that time I wasn`t even prepending the vga rom I extracted any more, I was watching the serial outputs);
• With Uwe Hermann help I understood I really didn`t need a vga rom
• My real problem was a memory module installed in the wrong slot;

I need to be sure of things, so I kept asking people if I was doing the correct thing, if the way I was building coreboot was right, now I can be sure, I was even doing the right thing.

It`s not good to spend so much time on it but I learnt a lot in the process. Thank you everybody who helped me, I appreciate so much your help.

My motherboard has arrived about two weeks ago, and the purchase of few other hadwares like processor, memory, cooler has been delayed some weeks.

I run out of credits, haven’t received my monthly payment and google hasn`t submitted the first payments, so, I don`t have enough money to buy the other hardwares, I`ll have to wait until May 21st when I receive my monthly payment.

More news coming soon….