coreboot changelog

This report covers commits b142b84afb to b66d673, up to Sunday, 2015-10-11
Last week saw the addition of the MacBookAir4,2 mainboard, which is especially notable because autoport did the largest part of the port – automatically, as the name implies.
In the course of this, autoport and some tools it relies on were improved.

Native VGA init saw some more bug fixes and better auto-configuration, so less values to configure by hand. Our other major reverse engineering effort, RAM init (and related functionality) for Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge, was also improved.

The ongoing vboot integration saw progress in adding support for a separate verification stage on x86 (not finished yet). In the course of these changes, the early x86 init code was refactored a bit to make moving Cache-as-RAM code to other stages easier. vboot also gained the first fixes to support CBFS as filesystem for the updateable flash regions, which still use a custom format.

There were also cleanups to the way the x86 bootblock is built, more closely matching our other stage build processes.

On the feature development side, Intel’s Skylake and Braswell chipsets as well as the related common Intel code saw numerous improvements and updates to new FSP interface versions.

The other notable feature was the addition of Dediprog EM100 “hyper term” support (ramstage only at this time) that allows using this SPI emulator as coreboot console output. Our em100 tool implementation also gained the ability to read this format.

libpayload gained the ability to deal with extended attributes containing hashes, which will be useful for payloads integrating with vboot.

Finally, Kconfig and the build system have seen a couple of cleanups, hiding items that aren’t user serviceable, as did buildgcc, our compiler toolchain generating script.