coreboot

GSoC 2014 Projects

Congratulations coreboot’s GSoC students. coreboot has three students working on coreboot for GSoC 2014 .

Title: Enhance early coreboot debugging

Student: Kyösti Mälkki

Mentors: Martin Roth and Rudolf Marek

Title: Generic Interface using alternate CBFS access patterns for ARM SoCs

Student: Naman Govil

Mentors Aaron Durbin and Marc Jones

Title: The yearly flashrom maintenance and enhancement proposal

Student: Stefan Tauner

Mentors Carl-Daniel Hailfinger and David Hendricks

Each student is required to post progress to this blog. We expect first posts later this week. Stay tuned for progress!

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 2011: midterm report under panic

Well my progress is not so shiny as other students. Looks like I overestimated my capabilities in my project proposal. I ended up with long exam session, lurking by reading coreboot mailing list (like an old cow), reading stuff about computer architecture, making hardware tools and trying to understand how git works 🙂

Done some patches, unfortunately, nobody likes it 🙂

Temporary libpayload fixes for flashrom as a payload

Flashrom as a payload with usb flash drive support

SerialICE for coreboot

Triggering another payload

For the second half of GSoC:

I’m working on “carFlashrom” (Yep, sounds a bit french) project:

http://www.coreboot.org/pipermail/coreboot/2011-July/065902.html

If this project is possible, then flashing would be possible without working RAM.

I would like to receive some response to my mails in the list as I am confused with my project goals, what others do think? I need some alternative goal if this is not feasible.

Give me some thoughts.

Bonus for readers: this one might be used with flashrom as rayer_spi. Modify flashrom source according to pinout and bits of par port registers:

http://logix4u.net/Legacy_Ports/Parallel_Port/A_tutorial_on_Parallel_port_Interfacing.html

I used m74hc244 from ST, even though parport signals are 5V, the chip is working right with VCC 3.3V.

http://dev.frozeneskimo.com/resources/jtag_wiggler_clone

GSoC2011 Project: Porting coreboot to ARM architecture

I am so excited that my idea on porting coreboot to ARM architecture has been accepted by GSoC project this year. First, let me introduce myself to you all. I am now a junior student at Hebei University of Technology, People’s Republic of China. My major is Computer Science and Technology. Although my courses are almost focus on high-level software development like database system and software engineering, I am a fan of low-level development. I taught myself IA32 and ARM architecture last year. And during this summer, we will porting coreboot to ARM and make it a new bootloader for ARM.

Those days, I am studying the building system of coreboot deeply, and I am trying to add cross-compile toolchain support to it. Developers has created such a great system and I want to make it greater. 🙂

Thanks for reading my project and any comment is welcome.

u-boot as coreboot payload

U-boot is bootloader on ARMs, PowerPCs and other platforms, it has a nice set of commands and in general it feels like a small operating system. I’m not certainly sure if it is good direction, please feel free to compare with UEFI 😉 but I simply miss it on x86. I work at SYSGO with u-boot in daily basis and even port it to different boards/platforms. The x86 is no easy to init and I think this is the reason why there is only one x86 board in whole u-boot tree. This board is called eNET and it has a AMD ELAN SC520 SOC. But luckily, with coreboot we can init much more x86 boards and this leads to natural conclusion to have the u-boot as the coreboot payload. I would like to share with you part of this “fantastic” hacking journey to make it happen. Continue reading u-boot as coreboot payload

libopenstm32 – a Free Software firmware library for STM32 ARM Cortex-M3 microcontrollers

I guess it's time to finally announce libopenstm32, a Free Software firmware library for STM32 ARM Cortex-M3 microcontrollers me and a few other people have been working on in recent weeks. The library is licensed under the GNU GPL, version 3 or later (yes, that's an intentional decision after some discussions we had).

The code is available via git:

 $ git clone git://libopenstm32.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/libopenstm32/libopenstm32
 $ cd libopenstm32
 $ make

Building is done using a standard ARM gcc cross-compiler (arm-elf or arm-none-eabi for instance), see the summon-arm-toolchain script for the basic idea about how to build one.

The current status of the library is listed in the wiki. In short: some parts of GPIOs, UART, I2C, SPI, RCC, Timers and some other basic stuff works and has register definitions (and some convenience functions, but not too many, yet). We're working on adding support for more subsystems, any help with this is highly welcome of course! Luckily ARM stuff (and especially the STM32) has pretty good (and freely available) datasheets.

We have a few simple example programs, e.g. for the Olimex STM32-H103 eval board (see photo). JTAG flashing can be done using OpenOCD, for example.

Feel free to join the mailing lists and/or the #libopenstm32 IRC channel on Freenode.

The current list of projects where we plan to use this library is Open-BLDC (an Open Hardware / Free Software brushless motor controller project by Piotr Esden-Tempski), openmulticopter (an Open Hardware / Free Software quadrocopter/UAV project), openbiosprog (an Open Hardware / Free Software BIOS chip flash programmer I'm in the process of designing using gEDA/PCB), and probably a few more.

If you plan to work on any new (or existing) microcontroller hardware- or software-projects involving an STM32 microcontroller, please consider using libopenstm32 (it's the only Free Software library for this microcontroller family I know of) and help us make it better and more complete. Thanks!

Category: embedded