The wiki is being retired!

Documentation is now handled by the same processes we use for code: Add something to the Documentation/ directory in the coreboot repo, and it will be rendered to https://doc.coreboot.org/. Contributions welcome!

or...

Toward a unified representation for the layout of coreboot flash images

N.B. The changes described herein are being made as part of the Chromium OS project; as such, they will initially be committed to the project's own fork of the main coreboot repository, which is available at https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/third_party/coreboot. Unless otherwise noted, the paths and processes described throughout this page are as they exist(ed) in a checkout of the master branch of the Chromium OS sources as they appeared at the beginning of 2015. One of the guiding design principles is to keep the tools general enough that they will be helpful to others, and the resulting work will be upstreamed to the main repository once it has been regression-tested in the context of Chromium OS hardware.

How it's currently done (how the Chromium OS project presently constructs firmware images)

Most Intel-based Chromium OS devices currently use an 8 MB firmware image that includes---among other things---the Intel ME firmware, a copy of coreboot including the ramstage and bootloader payload, two additional copies of the ramstage and bootloader payload, and a separate SeaBIOS payload. The primary description of this format exists in board-specific flattened device tree files. For instance, the layout of the Panther board's firmware exists at https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/platform/depthcharge/+/master/board/panther/fmap.dts, and results in an image that looks like this:

Section	Offset	Contents
RO
	0x700000	Boot (coreboot image)
	0x611000	GBB (Google Binary Block)
	0x610840	(Reserved)
	0x610800	FWID (Firmware ID)
	0x610000	FMAP (Flash MAP)
	0x604000	(Reserved)
	0x600000	RO-VPD (Vital Product Data)

	0x400000	Legacy (SeaBIOS image)
	0x3fa000	(Reserved)
	0x3f8000	RW-VPD (Vital Product Data)
RW-shared
	0x3f6000	Vblock-dev (third-party kernel signing keys)
	0x3f4000	Shared-data (RW firmware calibration data)

	0x3f0000	ELOG (Event LOG)
	0x3e0000	MRC-cache (Memory Reference Code training data)
RW-B
	0x3dffc0	FWID-B
	0x300000	Main-B (copy of coreboot ramstage and payload)
	0x2f0000	Vblock-B (signing keys)
RW-A
	0x2effc0	FWID-A
	0x210000	Main-A (copy of coreboot ramstage and payload)
	0x200000	Vblock-A (signing keys)
FW-descriptor
	0x001000	ME (Intel Management Engine firmware blob)
	0x000000	FD (Intel Firmware Descriptor header)

What's so bad about that (the pitfalls of this build model that we hope to solve)

Why you should care (how this pertains to all coreboot users)

How do we fix it (the solution being pursued)

Integration into the coreboot build-system

Something similar to what we do for CBFS files

cbfs-regions-y += fw_readonly
fw_readonly-name   := GOD_SAVE_THE_FIRMWARE
fw_readonly-offset := 0xblablabla
fw-readonly-size   := 0xblablabla

Put cbfs files in some default partition unless otherwise specified

# This is going into wherever the "default" cbfs partition is
cbfs-files-y += spd.bin
spd.bin-file := $(SPD_BIN)
spd.bin-type := 0xab

Now if we wanted to explicitly put a file in some non-default region, we could do something like

cbfs-files-y += payloadizer
payloadizer-region := USER_CAN_DO_WHATEVER
payloadizer-file   := payload_to_the_people
payloadizer-type   := blablabla

The advantage of having the notion of a default region means we can integrate the regionizing without disturbing existing code, which may not care about flash regions.

Flashmap