EC Firmware

Started by Mine, January 27, 2015, 06:01:01 PM

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Adarion

#1
I guess "embedded controller" means the same as Super-IO chip? Some chip responsible for low bandwidth communication, classic interfaces and so on?
Those have become a serious issue recently. Normally this was something that always worked. And for the last 2 years I stumbled over more and more mainboards with chips that were unsupported by kernel / lm_sensors. Thus no sensor readings, no flashrom and then no coreboot possibilities.
And no documentations, chip types that seemed to be custom tailored for a run of notebooks / mainboards and nobody would feel responsible (laptop vendor / chip maker).
It is a catastrophe.

If those chips are well documented and work with a free driver that would be a great opportunity. Is there any quick comparison of what functions are supported?
That also means the firmware that runs in this (ARM? AVR?) chip is written by the community and it does not contain any blobs that might trouble later?

Mine

It means even more in a laptop  http://www.coreboot.org/Embedded_controller

It also handles things like battery charging, lid/open closed, power management when the main CPU is off/asleep,  etc.