Coreboot Lands Hardware Support Improvements

Google is keeping to their open-source promise and preparing for an onslaught of Chrome OS devices with many changes the past few days being pushed into the Coreboot open-source firmware project widely used by Chromebooks. Besides the Google "Slippy" Chromebook being added this weekend was "Falco", "Peppy", and other new hardware support.

Much of this recent Coreboot activity appears to be around properly supporting the Intel Haswell-based Google Chrome OS devices. I had mentioned Lenovo hotkeys support being added to Coreboot then on Sunday was the already covered "Slippy" motherboard support.

Advancing Coreboot on Monday included:

- Falco support. Falco is the codename for another Haswell device with Lynxpoint chipset and uses the Google Chrome EC, is a Chrome OS device, and using Intel integrated graphics. Falco appears to be the new HP Chromebook 14 that has a price-tag as low as $299 and has a battery life rated for 9.5 hours of active use.

- Peppy mainboard support. Peppy is another Haswell-based Chrome OS laptop and appears to be one of the new Acer Chromebook models.

- Intel Ibex Peak is now supported, the codename for the original Intel Series 5 PCH Southbridge. With that support for the five year old Intel PCH is also Intel Nehalem Northbridge support.

- Coreboot will now do native graphics for QEMU.

- Haswell magic so the Intel DRM/KMS graphics driver will work on Coreboot. The Intel kernel driver expects the video BIOS to set a few of them, so now Coreboot bangs these registers too for making the Intel DRM driver happy but without Coreboot having to initialize the video BIOS.

Plus there's been many bug-fixes and other support improvements commited to Git for Coreboot. It appears that Google Coreboot engineers just received clearance in the past few days for making public a lot of their internal code changes that they use for Chrome OS devices.