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 I did one of these recently, for old time's sake. An old customer sent in an X200 for servicing, and upgrades. I replaced the onboard 8MB SPI flash with 16MB (Winbond W25Q128FVSIG). This allows you to easily put a full linux kernel with initramfs in the flash, if you wanted to. 9 comments
 @libreleah ok, but what's the point having kernel in bios chip? :blobfoxthink: For rescuing OS on HDD/SSD or you can use this kernel in the os itself? @Evv1L see: heads project i'm working on my own project similar in spirit to theirs. linux is capable of booting anything, and can be very powerful for this purpose (think: netboot) i'm working on two fronts: a tiny distro to go in flash, based on alpine linux, but i'm replacing busybox with code based on openbsd's userland; not released yet the other front is technically unrelated; i want a full openbsd-based project but with a linux kernel, and neat things added such as zfs (in linux) @libreleah sounds great! Good luck! Last question: Do you have plans for supporting ThinkPad T60 with ATI GPU in os-boot project? I made a Coreboot image with ATI support for it a long time ago with SeaBIOS as a payload. Clean GRUB2 payload didn't work (no image while booting) but SeaBIOS+GRUB2 chainload _should_ work. If you interested I can translate a guide for you :blobcat: @Evv1L it's on the backburner. the issue is i can't legally distribute the vga rom required; however, it should be possible to automate the extraction of it the issue with that particular GPU is that lenovobios modifies certain parameters of it at boot time, in ways that coreboot does not in coreboot, you have to use a rom extracted from /sys/ pre-modified from when you booted with lenovobios i could distribute roms, and tell you how to extract that vga rom, but i can't distribute the vga rom @Evv1L regarding grub: you can set coreboot to boot in text mode, and then grub should Just Work in my tests, booting in VESA mode never works on that board, when using the VGA ROM. you must boot grub in text mode |
Gregory's Server
> This allows you to easily put a full linux kernel with initramfs in the flash, if you wanted to.
Cool, but what's the point of it? What about kernel updates?
@libreleah