User talk:MrNuke

Ideas for generic handling of devices

IMPORTANT! Feel free to edit this page to share your thoughts and ideas. This is the official MMC open brainstorming page.

Proposal 1: Unified API

Chan is an IO channel.

This struct is used in Inferno and has been for a long time; so it works. It's also in the opcodes somewhat like what we did for EMMC on ARM.

struct Dev
{
	char*	name;
	void	(*reset)(void);
	void	(*init)(void);
	void	(*shutdown)(void);
	Chan*	(*attach)(char*); /* tell the device you want to use it */
	Walkqid*	(*walk)(Chan*, Chan*, char**, int); /* walk to a name in the device's managed name space; return a handle */
	int	(*stat)(Chan*, uchar*, int); // status info
	Chan*	(*open)(Chan*, int); /* get access to a resource in the device name space */
	void	(*close)(Chan*); /* tell it you are done with whatever it is. */
	long	(*read)(Chan*, void*, long, vlong);
	long	(*write)(Chan*, void*, long, vlong);
	void	(*power)(int);	/* power mgt: power(1) ? on, power (0) ? off */
};

Questions

1. Do we want to expose or hide the block nature of some devces (i.e. force reading multiples of blocksize, or allow reading any number of bytes, with no alignment requirement) ?
2. How do we connect the dots, such that most of the details can be handled transparently ?
3. How simple or complex do we want the API to be such that it can work in any stage (including bootblock, assuming some SRAM and a stack are available) ?
4. Can we integrate this into libpayload such that the same sources can be used for both coreboot and libpayload ?
   • think "Device specfic storage drivers -> [*] Allwinner A10 MMC driver" in libpayload config
5. More questions coming soon (TM)

Extending CBFS to support partitioning

Reasoning

• To separate write-protected (RO) and writeable (RW) regions of flash chip
• To incorporate relevant FMAP features directly into CBFS
• To be able to better handle the requirements of ChromeOS

Tentative terminology

• Partition
  • A region indexed by CBFS
• File
  • Same meaning as before. A CBFS file that resides entirely within the boundaries of one partition.

Design constraints

• Backwards compatibility
  • New CBFS structure should be backwards compatible with old structure
  • Old payloads should still be able to access old features of CBFS

Tentative API

• cbfs_get_file(const char *name) <- Get file in main partition, also backwards compatible
• cbfs_get_partition(const char *name) <- Get location of partition other than main (or even main)
• cbfs_get_partition_file(cbfs_part_t partition, const char *name) <- Get file in given partition

Hypothetical examples

Partition in read-write portion of flash

Here, we assume that "rw1" is not in a write-protected area of flash.

void *rw1 = cbfs_get_partition("rw1");
file *romstage cbfs_get_partition_file(rw1, "fallback/romstage);
load_and_run_stage(romstage);

MRC cache

void *mrc_cache = cbfs_get_partition("mrc.cache");
/* Access raw partition, there is no file in this partition */
mrc_cache_check(mrc_cache);
mrc_cache_write(mrc_cache, data);