Hello, I’m Asami. It is the time for the final evaluation of GSoC 2019 now. My project is adding QEMU/AArch64 support to coreboot. It would help developers for compatibility testing and make sure that changes to architecture code don’t break current implementations for ARMv8.
Here is my work on Gerrit. CL 33387 is the main patch for this project and it is successfully merged. We can now run coreboot on QEMU/AArch64.
- https://review.coreboot.org/c/coreboot/+/31938
- https://review.coreboot.org/c/coreboot/+/33287
- https://review.coreboot.org/c/coreboot/+/33387 (Main project)
- https://review.coreboot.org/c/coreboot/+/34250
- https://review.coreboot.org/c/coreboot/+/34367
- https://review.coreboot.org/c/coreboot/+/34535
- https://review.coreboot.org/c/coreboot/+/34774
- https://review.coreboot.org/c/coreboot/+/35022
- https://review.coreboot.org/c/coreboot/+/35024
What I’ve Done for My Main Project
Firstly I made a new directory qemu-aarch64 in src/mainboard/emulation/ and I was basically working on in it. In the bootblock stage, I have written custom bootblock code in assembly because an ARM virt machine doesn’t have SRAM, which means I had to relocate code inside ROM to DRAM during the first stage. I also made a memory layout with reference to the QEMU implementation. In the romstage and the ramstage, I registered a custom handler for detecting DRAM size because AArch64 throws a Synchronous External Abort that happens when you try to access something that is not memory.
I wrote documentation for how to use coreboot with QEMU/AArch64. Here is the page: https://doc.coreboot.org/mainboard/emulation/qemu-aarch64.html
Future Work
ARMv8 architecture has an integrated LinuxBios as a payload. However, I can’t run coreboot with it yet. It now causes an error while building. I also need to make sure that coreboot works well with ARM Trusted Firmware. So, I’d like to solve problems and I hope to see “Hello World” with LinuxBios.
Conclusion
I believe I almost succeed in my project. The main code has already merged and I also solved small problems found while working on the main project. The members of coreboot are really great and they, especially my mentor and reviewers, helped me a lot. It was not an easy project for me because I had never experienced to work on coreboot and I had to know the basic code flow of it. I’ve read much code and it made me grown up. Thank you all of the members for such an excellent time.
My Previous Blog Posts
- https://blogs.coreboot.org/blog/2019/06/16/gsoc-common-mistakes-for-beginners/
- https://blogs.coreboot.org/blog/2019/06/24/gsoc-debug-bootblock-stage-for-armv8-on-qemu/
- https://blogs.coreboot.org/blog/2019/07/17/gsoc-how-to-run-c-code-in-bootblock-stage-for-qemu-aarch64/
- https://blogs.coreboot.org/blog/2019/08/21/gsoc-how-to-use-arm-trusted-firmware-in-coreboot/