Tag: RockChip

coreboot gets Rockchip ‘Veyron Shark’ support

~ hucktech ~ Leave a comment

As reported today by Michael Larabel at Phoronix, coreboot recently got support for the Rockchip ‘Veyron Shark’ ARM SoC , used for Chromebook/Chromebox, with code from Google and Rock Chip.

To quote Phoronix:

“Julius Werner of Google’s Chromium team added the Veyron Shark mainboard into Coreboot Git. Shark is in turn is based off a copy of the Coreboot code for Veyron Speedy. Some of the code comes from Google while the rest is from Rockchip Inc. Rockchip’s latest chip series is the RK33xx that is based on an octa-core Cortex-A53 design with a GPU supporting OpenGL ES 3.1 and capable of HDMI 2.0 and 4Kx2K @ 60 FPS H.264/H.265 real-time video playback.”

Rock Chip nor coreboot didn’t didn’t consider this newsworthy, no press release. I’m grateful that Phoronix has such an efficient news gathering system, especially for tracking new features in coreboot.

More Information:

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Veyron-Shark-In-Coreboot

coreboot and Chrome OS upstreaming

~ hucktech ~ Leave a comment

I mainly work with UEFI technology, and don’t know much about coreboot, nor Chrome OS. I’m new to these tech, and learning them… 🙂

For a while, I thought coreboot was pretty inactive, but I now realize much of the coreboot activity has been taking place in Chrome OS. It appears that some of this work is now being upstreamed to the main coreboot.

From the coreboot blog:

“In the last months there was lots of activity in the coreboot repository due to upstreaming the work that was done in Chrome OS’ branch. We’re happy to announce that both code bases are again relatively close to each other. In the last 7 months, about 1500 commits that landed in coreboot originated in Chrome OS’ repository (of about 2600 total). Those came from 20 domains, which represent pretty much every part of the coreboot community: well known private and commercial coreboot contributors, but also BIOS and silicon developers as well as device manufacturers. Significant contributions that went into the tree recently were written with active support by Broadcom, Imagination Technologies, Intel, Marvell, Nvidia, Qualcomm, and RockChip.”

“In the future, Chrome OS will move over to a new branch point from upstream, and work on strategies to avoid diverging for two long years again. Instead, we’re looking for ways to keep the trees closer while also avoiding flooding the coreboot.org developer base with hundreds of patches. More on that as it is implemented.”

Some features that’ve been recently added include:
* new MIPS support
* improved ARM support, for SoCs by Broadcom, Marvell, Qualcomm, and RockChip
* an improved, safer method to declare the memory map on devices
* effort to get Chrome OS’ verified boot support
* update the flash image format to allow for safer incremental updates

This looks like great news for coreboot! I’ll have more blog entries about coreboot and Chrome OS in the near future.

More Information:

Report on Chrome OS upstreaming


http://coreboot.org/
http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/2014-firmware-summit
https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/chromiumos-design-docs/verified-boot