[GSOC] Panic Room, week #3

What happened during the past week ?

After many iteration of patches and bug hunting I finished writing and testing the code that added to cbfstool allows to convert between SELF and ELF.
The code has been now merged.

One of the most problematic things has been to get GRUB to work after the conversion to ELF whereas all of the other payloads were working wonderfully.
It turned out it is the only payload (that I tested) that used more than two segments to describe the memory image of  the program.
This also uncovered a bug contained inside the elf_writer code that was probably never triggered given that the majority of payloads only contain one segment (commit).

I also received the replacement mobo for my Lenovo X60 target, so I can get back on track with the SerialICE part of the project.

What are your plans for next week?

I am currently investigating a bug in the serial communication between QEMU and the target while using the most recent version of the patch that integrates SerialICE into coreboot.
I am also looking into some work related to selfboot.c and the region api; the objective is to avoid loading the payload all at once while it is being executed and allow for the various parts of the payload to be loaded when needed.
Hopefully I’ll manage to finish all of this before next week. (Sometimes I definitely feel too optimistic)

What?! Didn’t you have any mishaps© this week?

It’s indeed quite fascinating how my equipment keeps breaking… this week was my Raspberry Pi’s turn. It won’t boot anymore.
Fortunately I have a Bus Pirate and a BeagleBone Black to use for SPI flashing, so it’s all good.
EDIT: Scratch that… apparently you just need to wait for a while for it to reset… strange.

See you next week!