Suggestion for Firmware Option - Enable IMEI/HECI

Support General Device Support
1

I have an Asus Chromebox 3-N7068U, which has an 8th Gen. Intel i7-8850U CPU, Kabylake-R, UHD 620 IGPU, 16 GB DDR4, a 1 TB NVMe, and Broadcom WiFi/BT.

I have been using the MrChromeBox UEFI Full Rom successfully for a couple years but always had the problem that, when my computer woke from sleep, certain apps would not work properly. I tried to update the firmware hoping that it would fix the problem but it didn’t. That experience produced a different set of problems which I was able to resolve so that the newest firmware is working great on my Chromebox, which I am running as a Mac mini using macOS Sequoia.

Another MrChromebox firmware user helped me to solve my problem and told me that the problem I was having with my apps is that, in the firmware, HECI is enabled during the boot process but, at the end of the boot process, it is disabled. There is no switch in the firmware options to enable HECI so this user created a custom firmware which disabled the “Disable HECI1 at the end of boot` option.” in “make menuconfig”.

I tried his custom firmware, which he built for me using my board name, and it worked perfectly and solved the problem with my apps not working after waking from sleep. Because this option is already in “make menuconfig” it should be super-easy to make it visible in future versions of the UEFI Full Rom. Without it, I would need to build a custom firmware each time the firmware is updated. Call me lazy, but it would be great if it was just included in future versions of the MrChromeBox firmware. Thanks.

2

it’s not “super easy” since one has to hook up the code which does the hiding to a runtime option in addition to the Kconfig build-time option, then add the code to expose the option to the menu for all boards which use it. There’s also several different methods used to disable at end of boot, so there’s additional complexity there.

Open an issue on my github firmware tracker and I’ll take a look, but no promises.

3

Thanks for the response and I guess I don’t really know what constitutes super-easy for an all-purpose firmware. This is the guide for creating the custom firmware that enables HECI.

4

changing the config and rebuilding is easy.

making it a runtime option for multiple devices, less so

5

That makes sense. I’ll just keep my fingers crossed and/or stick with the firmware version I have now. We’ll have to wait and see what other goodies show up in future updates.