Infrastructure Projects

This page collects a list of projects to improve the infrastructure of coreboot-v2. Infrastructure means those parts of the code that aren't chipset or mainboard specific, but are used by all of them.

The idea is to consolidate a list of things "to do" with their status and responsible developers.

In progress

CBFS

A filesystem-alike layout for the coreboot image, to enable systems like bayou and to clean up the system in general (eg. no more buildrom)

Status

Upstream, Default for all boards. Patch available to remove pre-CBFS infrastructure

Developers

Stefan, Ron, Patrick, Myles

Low/High Tables

SeaBIOS requires a copy of various BIOS tables outside the fseg as it overwrites that segment. Generally clean out the table generation code.

Status

Upstream, implemented on some boards. Problems on others.

Developers

?

Build System

The current system of generated Makefiles is non-ideal (for too many reasons for this little margin). Fix it, somehow

Status

Upstream, boards are converted. Works side-by-side with the old system.

Developers

Stefan, Ron, Patrick, Uwe, Cristi

Config System

Use KConfig to improve the situation.

Status

Upstream, boards are converted. Works side-by-side with the old system.

Developers

Stefan, Ron, Patrick, Uwe, Cristi

Prototypes

Unify fallback/normal switch

Right now, the decision whether to use fallback or normal is in cache_as_ram_auto.c in many boards. Make that generic again (also helps with further CBFSification at some point).

Status

I created a bootblock that selects fallback or normal, then runs the romstage of them from CBFS. Even CAR is part of the CBFS file. That naturally leads to unification of fallback/normal, as code in that area moves around a lot. Unreleased prototype so far, boots QEmu, available on request

Developers

Patrick

Done

Port v3 Resource Allocator

The v3 resource allocator should be ported to v2

Status

Upstream. It's limited to one area for resources, that doesn't overlap with fixed resources.

Developers

Myles

More ideas

Unify text printing functions

There are several copies of print_* and printk_* in the code. Unify them so everything is happier than before (because the disjoint features are merged).

Unify ACPI

Every ACPI board has its own routines to compile the ACPI sources. Unify that. Also, figure out generic ACPI code and deduplicate it

Common payload location

Many boards in v2 have different names for the payload in targets/.../Config.lb (payload.elf, filo.elf, etherboot.elf, etc) and locations (../payload.elf, or various absolute paths which only work for one developer). We should fix this by using ../payload.elf as common payload name/location for all boards. A long-term solution will probably be the use of Kconfig in v2 where the user specifies a payload manually as in v3.

CMOS layout

Allow (somehow) to define defaults for all CMOS fields, and create a static table from that. Use that at runtime if the CMOS checksum fails.