ITE IT8568 Embedded Controller support

[lighto...@gmail.com]

Currently I am reverse-engineering firmware for IT8568vg in HP x2 Detachable 10-pXXX notebook/tablet. I wrote a tool for re-flashing this EC via i2c slave and successfully made a simple firmware for this chip.
I want to implement some features, which original vendor firmware doesn't have.

So, now I need to decide what to do next: use some project as a base for firmware development or write everything from scratch. afaik, chrome-ec already supports it8320 chip which is somewhat similar to it8568, and the whole project is based around EC's running in Chromebooks, so, I'd like to hear some developer opinions about adding support for this chip and HP x2 to chrome-ec.

It is OK for this project to add a support for non-Chromebook devices?

IT8568VG MCU is based on Intel 8051 ISA, it has 256 bytes of internal ram and 4KB of external ram. What is the system requirements of chrome-ec? Will it work with that low ram amount?

Since I don't have a datasheet, some of EC registers will be still unknown. For example, table of gpio -> interrupts -> wuc mapping will be incomplete, but I think i can implement support for EC functions that is used in my notebook.

[Nicolas Boichat]

Hi,

On Tue, Mar 5, 2019 at 11:32 PM <lighto...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Currently I am reverse-engineering firmware for IT8568vg in HP x2 Detachable 10-pXXX notebook/tablet. I wrote a tool for re-flashing this EC via i2c slave and successfully made a simple firmware for this chip.
> I want to implement some features, which original vendor firmware doesn't have.
>
> So, now I need to decide what to do next: use some project as a base for firmware development or write everything from scratch. afaik, chrome-ec already supports it8320 chip which is somewhat similar to it8568, and the whole project is based around EC's running in Chromebooks, so, I'd like to hear some developer opinions about adding support for this chip and HP x2 to chrome-ec.
>
> It is OK for this project to add a support for non-Chromebook devices?
>
> IT8568VG MCU is based on Intel 8051 ISA, it has 256 bytes of internal ram and 4KB of external ram. What is the system requirements of chrome-ec? Will it work with that low ram amount?

The EC codebase only supports 32-bit ISAs, so no 8051, sorry... You're
going to hit all sorts of issues if your ints/pointers are not 32-bit
long. Also, 4k of RAM is not going to be enough for most applications.

it8320 uses nds32 architecture, which is why we were able to use it
with our codebase.

Sounds like a fun project anyway, good luck!

Best,

> Since I don't have a datasheet, some of EC registers will be still unknown. For example, table of gpio -> interrupts -> wuc mapping will be incomplete, but I think i can implement support for EC functions that is used in my notebook.
>

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[lighto...@gmail.com]

The EC codebase only supports 32-bit ISAs, so no 8051, sorry... You're
going to hit all sorts of issues if your ints/pointers are not 32-bit
long. Also, 4k of RAM is not going to be enough for most applications.

it8320 uses nds32 architecture, which is why we were able to use it
with our codebase.

Sounds like a fun project anyway, good luck!

Well.. then it will be a hard way :)

Thanks.

[torrga...@gmail.com]

Hi, I have the same pc and am very interested in your project, got any links to share?