News from coreboot world
hi i am Cai Bai Yin. And my GSOC 2010 project is Payload infrastrcuture. The main job may including adding payload build support to the coreboot kconfig and crossgcc build which would make the project as an whole. if time permit, some filo improment will aslo be included.
I am a freshman to coreboot. But i am trying my best to do things better. There may be lots of tough probems stay in front of me. Hope i can deal everything well. I will aslo try to learn as much as i can from the others.
Hi! My name’s Robert Austin, and my GSoC 2010 project is to get TianoCore working well as a coreboot payload. TianoCore is the open source component of Intel’s implementation of UEFI. TianoCore on it’s own is not a BIOS replacement, but it can do some interesting things, and since a quite a few large companies are already committed to EFI, it makes sense to have an EFI payload as an option in coreboot.
I am very excited about working on this project, and working with the coreboot community. I will make regular announcements about my progress here on this blog, and I will keep my working code available in a git repository here. There isn’t anything there yet, but there will be soon. To anyone who happens to checkout my code during the summer, I welcome any comments or suggestions relating to the style or quality of my code. I want to write high-quality code, so feedback is appreciated.
It is my second year to join GSOC. In this year, i will take in charge of AMD RS780+SB700 mass porting. I would like to write down each progress here between this summer.
Today, the dediprog ISP-Testclip-SO8 has arrived. although it’s pretty expensive, but it seems pretty cute. I have already tested in in BTDC lab, hope it can helps me much more.
After starting the USB stack in libpayload in the Google Summer of Code of 2007, I’m back this year to implement some more drivers. So far, we support UHCI Controllers – that is, USB1.x on Via and Intel chipsets.
There are also patches to support OHCI which are under GPL licensing As libpayload ist BSD-licensed, this make it unsuitable for inclusion. So this year I’ll do a clean implementation of OHCI to get this matter settled.
With this, all USB1.x controllers except for some very rare pre-standard controllers will be supported. This also includes USB2 boards, which means all current mainboards out there, as USB2 simply requires “companion controllers” (which are usually OHCI or UHCI) for USB1 modes.
After this is done, I’ll start on USB3 support. USB3 is still relatively new, but there are two reasons to start working on it:
Implementing OHCI and xHCI ensures that all current boards as well as those of the near future will be supportable by libpayload and its users.
Welcome to the coreboot developers’ blog. This will become the place where our awesome Google Summer of Code students will log their progress during this summer. I’m really looking forward to all the great projects we are going to have this year. Of course, if you are a coreboot developer, and want to post here, drop me a note.
As you may know there's a Google Summer of Code program again this year.
The deadline for student applications is April 9th at 19:00 UTC, so if you're a student and you want to work on a coreboot (open-source BIOS / PC firmware) or flashrom (open-source BIOS chip flasher) project, please apply in time.
The following coreboot/flashrom GSOC project ideas have been proposed so far (but you can also suggest your own ideas, of course):
See this wiki page for why and how to apply for a coreboot/flashrom project.
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!
Quick public service announcement (which probably comes a bit too late, sorry):
There's a coreboot developer room at this year's FOSDEM (Free and Open-Source Software Developer's European Meeting), which starts roughly... um... today. In 20 minutes, actually. Unfortunately I cannot be there, hopefully there will be video archives of the talks. If you're at FOSDEM already, here's the list of talks:
Sat 13:00-14:00 coreboot introduction (Peter Stuge)
Sat 14:00-15:00 coreboot and PC technical details (Peter Stuge)
Sat 15:00-16:00 ACPI and Suspend/Resume under coreboot (Rudolf Marek)
Sat 16:00-17:00 coreboot board porting (Rudolf Marek)
Sat 17:00-18:00 Flashrom, the universal flash tool (Carl-Daniel Hailfinger)
Sat 18:00-19:00 Flash enable BIOS reverse engineering (Luc Verhaegen)
Highly recommended stuff if you're interested in an open-source BIOS and/or open-source, cross-platform flash EEPROM programmer software.