Category: flashrom

GSoC [coreboot debugging] Now it is broken, now it is not

I feel I did not make much progress the last week, I realised I wasted two days looking for error in my code and I finally found the error elsewhere. As for preparation to push my developments to review, I had rebased my tree. That is, I had picked up the developments done by other people in to my setup. My mistake. While the error still persists there in the master tree, in the process of recovering my platform I learned that there are two types of SOIC-8 SPI flash chips, ones that fit in the miniature socket I have and ones that are physically too large. The spare chips I had were of the second type and that slowed down my system recovery procedure radically. New flash chips are waiting for pickup in the store now.

This is actually just the situation I want coreboot to deal with better in the future: doing a firmware upgrade without the risk of bricking the device to the point where you need to use an external programmer device to recover. Problem is specifically with laptops, which may take a good hour or so to disassemble and put back together, and with every disassembly the risk of breaking some of those miniature connectors increases.

My plan of having two copies of firmware in the same flash chip image just got a bit more complicated. I learned that with recent platforms using a so-called binary blob for raminit, aka. system-agent binary, it is not possible to do a type of dual-boot-prefix setup I had planned, since one cannot put two system-agent binaries in the same CBFS image. I hope the system-agent build and release process is seriously improved to overcome this issue as badly gone(/done) binary blob upgrade procedure was the root-cause of my troubles the past week.

I have not really had a chance to test pre-OS flashing with FILO (actually the code might not yet be available for me to download). Instead I have attacked the low-level PCI and IO sources to reduce a good two or three copies from coreboot tree, this will help my efforts in the long run with SerialICE integration work.

 

GSoC 2013 [flashrom] week #2

This week I have a very important directive to share with you:

Working (and especially debugging) in a methodological way does not only mean that every step should be taken on scientific grounds, but that the order of steps should be in an effective order too.

Why do I mention that? Last week I told you that the nice guys at Sage and AMD have sent me an ASRock Kabini board. I received it the following day (which amazed me quite a bit, because it came from US hence it had to undergo a customs check too…), hooked everything up: an old 300W ATX power supply (way overpowered for a 10W SoC) which I have used for coreboot development in the past, USB keyboard and mouse, network, a USB key with Ubuntu and a power button. I switched the PSU on, pressed the button and the fan began to rotate… for a few hundred milliseconds. WTF? I stripped away the non-essential connections and tried again – no change. I thought it could be the PSU – maybe the load is too small or something. But since I had no other supply easily accessible I decided to look at other possible causes: I checked all jumper settings (and there are quite a few of them) and noted a difference between the docs and the actual board regarding the jumpering of an always-on feature (which was a dead end but seemed very promising first), I cleared CMOS memory, reseated the DIMM etc. I even hooked up the flash chip to my logic analyzer to see if it tries to read commands from it… but there was no single proof of life.

So what do you think, is the board dead?

Did you spot the error I made? I hope you did with the blunt hint in the beginning. 🙂 After pulling another PSU out of an old PC and hooking it up everything was fine. *sigh*

When getting the board up eventually I just did a few quick tests (including the flashrom hack that Wei Hu contributed after some discussion in my previous blog post (oh who would have thought that these blog posts are useful at all!? :P)) and put it aside again for hacking in the weeks to come.

The remaining time was spent again on bringing flashrom up to shape for release, waiting for Carl-Daniel and negotiating with a Micron representative over support for their (i.e Numonyx’ and ST’s) chips in flashrom. It has not been the first time for me to mail back and forth with flash vendors, but it is always quite tedious to explain non-technicians and/or people with no idea about open source what we have to offer and what we need; often language barriers play a role too. For example I tried to explain to a Macronix guy about 3 or 4 times why I can not truthfully fill out the sampling order form completely (i.e. the company field) before I gave up. I can’t remember if I filled out the form in the end or not, but I received the samples eventually. Together with the Micron samples that should arrive this week and other samples I received previously I will soon have more than 1GB of SPI flash space at my desk, yay. 🙂

GSoC 2013 [flashrom] week #1: while(1);

This week I was busy preparing flashrom for the 0.9.7 release and queue up some overdue patches to be merged shortly after. This includes the infamous layout patches which I need to polish a bit since quite some time has passed since they were created and the surrounding conditions have changed a bit. Not only did flashrom evolve quite a bit (the original version of the layout patches were part of my GSoC 2011 contributions(!)), but I have learned a few tricks in the meantime too, I hope. Progress is rather slow because I am waiting for Carl-Daniel’s input to various issues but there is no response. That’s also the reason why I chose the subject for this blog post ;).

When I stumbled over a discussion in #coreboot about the new AMD SoCs (Kabini et al, preliminary BKDG), I discovered that they apparently contain a new flash interface supporting all kind of neat stuff (e.g. Multi I/O). This would match parts of my GSoC project perfectly and so I made a joke by asking who will send me a board. To my pleasant and big surprise I received a private message a few minutes later and a brand new ASRock IMB-A180-H is currently on the way to me. I want to express my gratitude to Martin Roth from Sage who was so kind to arrange this and Sage and AMD for paying for it. 🙂

Lately I’ve been looking at libpayload a bit since it will probably play some role in Kyösti’s project in conjunction with libflashrom. So it is also important that I grasp it before I am working on libflashrom. I got (lib)flashrom to compile locally with a slightly patched version of libpayload (patches pushed upstream of course). I hope to get the changes needed in flashrom out before release (NB: I am talking about the current state of libflashrom not about Nico’s patchset). After that I’ll continue to queue up/refine overdue patches – the main focus will be on Nico’s libflashrom.

Launch control and a brief test-flight

superboostedLast time, I promised I would prepare you for a short test-flight. We won’t go into a full orbit, but we will turn on the thrusters, launch, and land safely. This is a real mission. We will actually launch the Stellaris into firmware low-orbit.

The Toolchain

We need a tool to transform the flight plans into something the Stellaris can understand. I will call this The Toolchain. Having a good toolchain (compiler and supporting libraries) will save us a lot of trouble. Well, it will save you a lot of trouble; I already have a decent toolchain. At the very least, the toolchain should be aware of the following:

  • Hard-float “-mfloat-abi=hard -mfpu=fpv4-sp-d16” compiled libraries
  • A minimal C library
  • libnosys

I will be using the summon-arm toolchain, but any arm-none-eabi will do. I won’t go over the details of setting up this or that toolchain. The options are plentiful.

The Debugger

We need a tool to monitor the Stellaris in-flight, and solve any potential issues. Let’s call this tool The Debugger. I will be using OpenOCD since it works for me (TM). You will need version 0.7.0 or newer, with ti-icdi support enabled. I will say no more.

HINT: if you need to build it from source, pass “–enable-maintainer-mode –enable-ti-icdi” to the configure script.

The Flight Plans

This is the fun part. I have been working since last year on Flight Plans for the Stellaris Launchpad. Courtesy of flight engineer Peter Stuge, the flight plans are available on the QiProg website (more on that later).

OK, let’s get them:

$ git clone git://git.stuge.se/vultureprog.git
$ cd vultureprog

And the flight plans for the subsystems:

$ git submodule init
$ git submodule update

Now it’s time to choose our mission:

$ git checkout 841ba3460767eefc2c744ec03c37e7e383cd8485

Now that we have everything we need:

$ make

This should get the Flight Plan primed and ready.

The Launch

Assuming everything went fine so far, we are go for launch. Prepare your Stellaris Launchpad. When you are ready for launch:

$ make flash -C boards/lm4f/stellaris-ek-lm4f120xl/

WARNING! Do not look directly in the thrusters (LEDs) of the Stellaris. Thrusters are operated at full power and may cause temporary loss of vision.

If you see the thrusters (LEDs) alternating, then launch was a success. Congratulations! During the test flight, you can try pressing the buttons on the Stellaris (HINT: they do something).

The Announcements

Peter Stuge has been kind enough to set up a website for QiProg on his own time. It’s http://qiprog.org . Stable code will be pushed to the git repositories at http://git.qiprog.org. Development will be kept on github for the time being, on my vultureprog repository. I will only be pushing stable updates to qiprog.org.

That’s all for now. Mission accomplished.

 

GSoC 2013 [flashrom]: hi there again ;)

My name is Stefan Tauner and I am still studying computer engineering at the Vienna University of Technology. I participated in one of coreboot’s GSoC projects in 2011 and continued to contribute mainly to flashrom since then. I became pretty much its main contributor in the process so I could not just leave afterwards. Also, some of my patches from back then are still not merged so when coreboot was accepted for this year’s GSoC the goal was clear: increase the patch pile even more. 😉 Naturally I’ll be working on flashrom’s core. I plan to add some infrastructure improvements which are kind of overdue. Please see my full proposal for details.

Flashrom 0.9.4 released – Flashing BIOS/ROM chips from the Unix/Linux command line using various programmers

flashrom logo

Forgot to mention this here: We released flashrom 0.9.4 a few days ago, the latest release of the open-source, GPL'd ROM chip flashing software for Linux, *BSD, DOS, and partially also Windows (work in progress, though).

Here's a quick summary of the release announcement. Some of the noteworthy news items include:

  • Support for new programmers: OpenMoko Neo1973/Neo FreeRunner debug board version 2 or 3, Olimex ARM-USB-TINY, ARM-USB-TINY-H, ARM-USB-OCD, and ARM-USB-OCD-H, Open Graphics Project development card (OGD1), Angelbird Wings PCIe SSD/88SX7042, ITE IT85xx embedded controllers, Intel NICs with parallel flash.
  • Dozens of added flash chips, chipsets, mainboards.
  • Improved Dediprog SF100 support.
  • Add support for more than one Super I/O or EC per machine.
  • Always read the flash chip before writing, for improved error checking and faster programming.
  • Enable write support on NVIDIA MCP6x/MCP7x.
  • Lots of bugfixes, documentation fixes, internal improvements, etc.

Get the latest release tarball, or download and build the most recent version via Subversion:

  $ svn co svn://flashrom.org/flashrom/trunk flashrom
  $ cd flashrom
  $ make

I already updated the Debian package to 0.9.4 (it has also already migrated to Debian testing and Ubuntu), other people have updated Fedora, Gentoo, NetBSD etc. etc.

There's already a huge amount of patches queued for the next release, including support for even more programmers, PowerPC support (tested on Mac Mini and others), and of course the usual "more boards, more chips" items...

GSoC 2011: flashrom part 5 – Dear Intel

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: Continue reading GSoC 2011: flashrom part 5 – Dear Intel

GSoC 2011: flashrom part 4 – recap

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: flashrom part 3 – Midterm Evaluation

in schools essays that stray away from topic are often graded strictly. if one applies similar principles to my gsoc work it would probably degrade to “satisfactory” or worse. when i submitted my application for gsoc, most of my time line consisted of reverse engineering tasks. the plan was to quickly implement hardware sequencing and start reversing some vendor tools to find out how they unlock the ME.

what really happened is something i think is at least as useful as working ME unlocking code: flashrom got an almost full-time maintainer. 😉
i am handling a big chunk of the daily work (support requests on the mailing list and on IRC, keeping our database of tested devices up to date etc.) and i try to fix all problems in flashrom that i become aware of. this has led to countless already accepted patches and many which are still not reviewed yet. Continue reading GSoC 2011: flashrom part 3 – Midterm Evaluation