good approach. what will you do with the bios now?
Most people are dumping it to mod to improve the performance of desktop's GPU or just to backup.
But I plan to use this Video BIOS
(AMD AtomBIOS) together with coreboot open source BIOS :
https://www.coreboot.org/
https://www.coreboot.org/Supported_Motherboards
This wonderful BIOS is fully open source - which has a lot of real advantages!
You can:
1) Personally verify that there are no secret backdoors in it.
Also there are no stupid restrictions like Wi-Fi card whitelists
2) Rebuild and update it even every day, because it has several source code updates every day!
Meanwhile, the "ordinary BIOS" is forgotten by manufacturer after 1-2 years since the release of laptop/motherboard
3) Easily add a lot of cool stuff right in this BIOS: memtest, Tetris, GRUB bootloader, Linux kernel,
and even Kolibri OS -
https://kolibrios.org/en/ - tiny OS with GUI that fits on a floppy, written on pure assembly
4) Participate in its' development: fixing the bugs, adding new features and advancing your coding skills.
However, there are not many bugs in it - because its' source code is open, it is much better quality
than the "ordinary BIOS" written by outsourced team of Indians for a bowl of rice at the coding sweatshop
5) Boot it very quickly - thanks to its' relatively small and optimized source code it boots like a lightning
It is hard to obtain all the datasheets necessary to port coreboot to new hardware.
Partially thats why coreboot supports only a few laptops and motherboards,
the majority are Lenovo laptops just because Linux software developers love them
https://www.coreboot.org/Supported_Motherboards
as you see, AMD-based Lenovo G505S is a part of this list, - and maybe your computer is also???
Sometimes you need a few closed source binaries
(aka "blobs") to add to this open source BIOS.
For example: some models of G505S have only integrated GPU, but a lot of have integrated+discrete.
In any case, if I don't add integrated GPU Video BIOS binary to my coreboot BIOS before flashing it,
there will be no video signal at laptop's internal screen as well as at external,
and then this laptop could be used only as a headless server.
Also, often this video BIOS has to be extracted from a booted laptop with proprietary BIOS.
At least in case of AMD GPU, if you extract a Video BIOS from manufacturer's BIOS image,
(e.g. by using InsydeH20 BIOS tools https://github.com/s-sosnitskiy80/Insider_BIOS_Tools )
these "clean" AtomBIOS are not initialized enough and I got no working backlight with them
After getting the "dirty" AtomBIOS ROM
(extracted from a booted laptop with proprietary BIOS)
that belongs to integrated GPU, and copying it to coreboot BIOS, my backlight became working!
But I still have problems with R5 M230 discrete graphics card, it is visible by PCI but doesn't work!
Could be a driver problem
(AMD Linux open source drivers are not good enough yet) ,
but maybe if - in addition to integrated GPU Video BIOS - I also add a "dirty" discrete GPU Video BIOS
(that I got with this method above) to coreboot open source BIOS, maybe then my discrete card will work...
Sorry for long explanation, hopefully its' not boring enough to be TLDR
Good luck to your projects,
@W1zzard , and happy hacking