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I have a few pcengine apu-2 routers and one of their most underrated features is that they use coreboot. It is hard to quantify exactly why this is nice, but I
by somat 4y ago
I have a few pcengine apu-2 routers and one of their most underrated features is that they use coreboot.
It is hard to quantify exactly why this is nice, but I will try. I think it is because you now have a situation where because the whole toolchain is public there can be no magic in it. so the firmware and the flashing process feels more solid and predictable than most other firmware. specificly, I run openbsd on mine and flashrom has no problem updating the firmware[1]. a very unsupported configuration. I will probably never need to build my own firmware but I really like knowing that I could.
1. The trick to flashing firmware on openbsd is understanding that openbsd as part of it's normal boot shuts off a lot of memory access(sysctl kern.securelevel). so the easiest way is boot into single user mode so flashrom can write to the correct memory addresses.
- woleium 4y agoI used to use openbsd on my apu-2, but since I upgraded to a gigabit wan connection I had to move to Linux as I just couldn't make it do line speed gigabit :(( Did you have any success?
- _0xdd 4y agoI usually max out at ~700 mbps running the latest version of OpenBSD. A trade-off I'm willing to take, but others may not.
- peter_d_sherman 4y ago>1. The trick to flashing firmware on openbsd is understanding that openbsd as part of it's normal boot shuts off a lot of memory access(sysctl kern.securelevel). so the easiest way is boot into single user mode so flashrom can write to the correct memory addresses. This is an excellent point! Flashrom + runlevel 1 in most linux/unix'es = best chance to read/write BIOS/(U)EFI ((E)EP)ROM/flash... Also, +1 for OpenBSD.