Bifferboard porting

0
10 days
by in coreboot

Ever heard about the bifferboard? It is a small RDC x86 SoC with 150MHz 486 compatible CPU, 8MB flash and 32MB RAM, ethernet and TTL serial line and a few GPIOs. It comes with very tiny loader called biffboot. Quite natural target for coreboot and u-boot. My flatmate purchased one but never had actually time to do anything with that so here it comes. (more…)

Coreboot in shipping products

2
137 days
by in Business, coreboot, embedded, firmware

We are starting to see coreboot in more shipping products this summer and I expect even more in the fall. The exciting thing is that coreboot is becoming a piece of technology that vendors are starting to advertise. A recent example is the Portwell PCS-8277:

PORTWELL ANNOUNCES REVOLUTIONARY IN-VEHICLE PC
WITH THE BOOT SPEED OF AN APPLIANCE New PCS-8277 telematics system based on Coreboot® technology with HD graphics processing engine 

I think that we are starting to see vendors and customers becoming more knowledgeable about what is going into their products and how coreboot is an advantage in many situations. I hope to see more announcements in the coming months.

GSoC: Spice Payload report

3
156 days
by in GSoC

Yeah! it`s came the time to write another report on GSoC status. In fact I`ve – intentionally – postponed it for quite some time and it doesn`t exactly mean there was a lack of informative emails between me and Marc(my mentor).

The need to finish some stuffs justifies – in some ways – the aforementioned delay. I understand you don`t need to report you aren`t done with something, a mail stating “I`m not done yet” would be enough - well, maybe not anyway…

OpenEmbedded Journey

With the second half of my project I jumped in the OpenEmbedded ecosystem and believe it, I`ve loved to get in touch with.

Putting my hands on OE is something I`ve planned for some time, I just hadn`t had the time to do so.

OpenEmbedded is something amazing, and it does what I realized years ago when I worked with gentoo. I always saw gentoo as a great meta-distribution, something you can bend and forge as you need – customizing it according to your needs.

Despite all the conceptual things touching OE wasn`t as easy as I initially tought it would. Bitbake(the great maestro behind OE) was designed with portage in mind and theoretically it was I good advantaged to me – look, theoretically.

Nothing is exactly smooth as you plan, you`ll always get troubles in the way – with OE wasn`t an exception.

OE transitions and yocto project

One of the biggest problems I faced was mainly due the transition the OE project is getting through. The docs(Getting started wiki page for example) are out dated and you get conducted by the old code base, and trust me, it`s not a good way to get started.

My first two weeks was full of crazy hacks, searching for old tarballs, setting up local source repositories, doing everything I could to make that thing to work – it was a bad race doing my best to proof the howtos.

The true is OpenEnbedded has moved to what we name bblayer, it`s a bitbake feature to ease to extend a base system. The intention(as I see) is to keep a minimal, clean and stable set of core packages and yet make it possible to “third party” vendors to append it to fit their needs.

The yocto project has extensively used OpenEmbedded as their base system, both the projects have exchanged a lot and sometimes you loose yourself if you`re touching one or the other. One of the tools provided by yocto project is Poky – which`s actually an OE layer.

There isn`t plenty of docs describing how the bblayer and bbappend work – the bitbake docs aren`t much precise and the OpenEmbedded barely mention it, yocto just describes how it`s fit within poky(or something close to that).

I would really like to recommend newcomers to first play with poky then later consider starting a new third-party layer.

The project as a bblayer

A third party layer is what best fits my project, not exactly a full yocto/poky layer, maybe and extension of it or not even that but an own layer itself, to accomplish that I had to experiment a lot, setting the environment up and watching how everything get together.

Packaging

After many years not touching a single ebuild and having never touched a bb package I jumped in the task to pack some components. The spice client has a bunch of dependencies – of course, I hadn`t to pack everything myself, a great number of things were already done.

Among the things that got me longer then I expected was cyrus-sasl, the old OE tree had it packaged but it was an old version – should I mention it was broken as well?

So, bringing the recipes wouldn`t be enough but I would have to fix things up, once fixing stuffs was the only alternative I decided to upgrade it to the latest version 2.1.31.

Anyway, it brought me a lot of work to pick patches to fix its building and fixing what hadn`t got fixed already. My final PR was 177 what means I came through 177 builds, debugging, testing and working everything around.

The cyrus-sasl code has a bug introduced after 2.1.21, it wasn`t possible to build it –with-static. I did an ugly and ridiculous fix. Everything I found out there – searching the internet – was even uglier. Suggestions to run make twice was one of them. The build system was kind of messed up.

The other packages weren`t so painful and I could quickly move forward.

Slimming the image

I still have to slim few things, I need to cut some X11 packages I included in the image, append the yocto kernel with my own .config and write a small shell script(or something smarter than that) to launch the spice client.

BuildRom

The first thing I worked on in the beginning of my project was buildRom, I wanted to bring all the tasks involved on building the OS image and bios/firmware into to it. But, with my move to OE for building the OS image I realized I could go the reversed way and bring the tasks for building the bios/firmware to OE.

Now I`ve manually packaged the things but have already started to write bbclass to controll bios/firmware + image building and packaging them. I see it as a second generation to BuildRom project, a OE layer with coreboot bb packages and recipes plus the needed bb classes.

Conclusion

After the great effort I had, getting in touch by the first time with OE, I feel comfortable to say it was a good experience to me, I realized many possibilities. I`m really happy with everything I learned on the path and I`m sure I still have a lot to contribute to Coreboot and OE as well.

GSoC 2011: flashrom part 5 – Dear Intel

1
163 days
by in Business, flashrom, GSoC

As mentioned in my GSoC recap, Carl-Daniel and i have sent a letter to Intel to get more information regarding the descriptor section and unlocking the ME flash protection (my official GSoC main project). It was sent about 3 weeks ago (2011-07-29). No reply was received so far. This is the whole message we have sent them: (more…)

GSoC 2011: flashrom part 4 – recap

2
168 days
by in flashrom, GSoC

Final evaluation deadline for this year’s GSoC is in 2 weeks. Most of what i have written in my midterm evaluation is still valid.

We have formulated and sent an email to various Intel representatives in the hope to get at least a few hints regarding ME unlocking (and descriptor semantics). I had the idea to send them a mail earlier, but thought it is an ludicrous attempt from all i have gathered regarding Intel’s cooperation with coreboot. Carl-Daniel suggested giving it a go anyway and it provided me a good excuse to not work on REing until we get an answer. Of course we have not received any reply to date :(

So i think it is quite clear that my main GSoC project will fail to be delivered on time. But i won’t vanish after GSoC and i still plan to implement ME unlocking eventually.

What’s up besides the GSoC project?

The integration of my patches still lacks reviewing power. Everyone but Carl-Daniel seems to be not much interested in my work and he has not the time to look at everything i produce. Right now flashrom has about 150 patches requiring some action to merge them. Thereof are 41 from me (TBH there is a number of patches that are just rebased and improved a little bit) and 37 from Carl-Daniel. meh.

With the help of Florian ‘florz’ Zumbiehl i was also able to find, fix and report a bug in dmidecode which has direct influence on flashrom. Due to an error in decoding the chassis type in dmidecode, flashrom falsely declares some boards to be mobile devices, which makes it shout a big warning at the user unnecessarily.

I’ve been also working on rebasing, improving and reviewing (very) old patches of others whose discussions just stopped (for example when contributors did not send improvements). My hope is that this will help us shorting the long patch queue, but i doubt that it will suffice ;)

To conclude (or begin) my recap of my GSoC involvement this year, i’d like to first thank google for doing this. This sounds quite pathetic, especially if one knows me better. But it really got me involved in FOSS development with the intensity i wished for (by providing a monetary motivation to get really started). There was some involvement in the past (bug reports and fixes etc.), but flashrom was apparently a nice target to get more involved and learn a lot, not so much about REing and technical details (as i expected and hoped in the beginning), but regarding project management in FOSS (my own proposal, but also flashrom and its patch queue/processing and “upper management’s” free time constraints), interacting with contributers and users, and mastering git (the latter is quite ironical because flashrom does not use it (yet)). It’s a bit sad, that flashrom does not have more contributers (especially reviewers). This is obviously a problem and it might be the time to discuss the development process as a whole. The question is with whom should i discuss this if no one is there :)

Although my formal project will not be finished on time, i think i have served the flashrom project well and from the feedback i received so far, Carl-Daniel is also happy with my work. So i think i can declare it as successful after all and i would like to thank everyone involved (so far).

GSoC 2011: little trip

0
170 days
by in coreboot

This might be not a good idea, but I had got bored with my project not going well, so I eventually got on trip, through “FOSS and friends” :) I have had some headache with nouveau driver, till I understood that deprecated version was installed. Tried to install a package, which got me in a geometric progression of required dependency packages :) I have filed a bug for LibreOffice, and got one future TODO for “reverse enginering” how exactly CUPS works with one of the label printers we have here as it needs a slight modification. The best thing I have done is started reading a book and building “Linux From Scratch (LFS)”. It’s great while building a package you are accompanied with a short page of info about it, not all manual :) Also I have found out that I don’t have good stuff to read, except that 1k pages book about Linux internals :) While looking at the freenode chatrooms list I have found this resource about c language: http://www.iso-9899.info – all it needs is time for reading everything :)

 

My project progress is really slow. As Marc suggested I have done some work to reduce stack usage: wrapped functions to read and use file by 256B peaces (somewhat default granularity). But that still needs testing and cleaning up. Also I need to cleanup my previous work that I haven’t submitted to the list, which enabled running code in car (even though not completely working, as mtrr settings might be wrong or more problems still there).

flashrom 0.9.4 released

0
183 days
by in flashrom

After 9 months of development since the last stable version we are happy to announce the release of flashrom 0.9.4.

AMD adds Family10 G34 coreboot support

0
185 days
by in AMD, coreboot

AMD has added the Family10 G34 support to coreboot. This new support located in the AGESA vendorcode area. This AGESA code should be used for new Family 10 development. The initial development platform is the Super Micro H8QGI+-F mainboard.

 

Thanks to Kerry and Frank @ AMD for the submission.

 

A small side note, this addition put coreboot tree at over a million lines of code.

 

GSoC2011: coreboot spice payload, OE and rootfs

2
187 days
by in coreboot

As stated in my midterm report I’m working this first 2 weeks after midterm to work on building the payload image. I wanted to hardcode everything but we(my mentor and I) understood it would be better to use something like OpenEmbedded for that.

 
This first week I studied OpenEmbedded. I tested many distributions starting with angstrom, they showed too heavy for our purpose. After those tests I found micro and realized it would be a better start.

 
With that I’m working around micro to build our own distro, I’m adding X11 dependencies and right now I’m packing the spice client and its dependencies. In the end of the week I must have sorted every details.

GSoC2011(Week 9): boot ARM using coreboot to romstage

0
191 days
by in ARM, coreboot, GSoC

Hi all. Here I come again. With one week’s work, coreboot now can add romstage to the romfile, pass control to the romstage and find ramstage. I add a new way using a binary file to add stage to a rom file. Since I have not got an idea of how to store the hardware information, no hardware initialization is done now except the console. Following I will show you some snapshots:
This is a romfile without ramstage so it hangs at finding it:

This is a romfile with a simple ramstage. The ramstage code only sends a string “Hello ARM!” to the console then hangs there. It is compressed using LZMA in the romfile and should be decompressed and copied to the RAM at address 0×5000. This romfile is for testing the decompress function and move-jump function.

Next week, I will work on the ramstage. It is one of the hardest parts since we will deal with the hardware information. I need to design it and implement it. I want my code to be tested and reviewed early for that it is not only about implementation but also design. One could change an implementation with a low cost but couldn’t change a design with a low cost.
Thanks to God and Thanks to all the coreboot developers. Working with you all is so happy and fantastic!

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