[coreboot] GSoC-2014 Project for Coreboot

[Naman Govil]

Hi!
I am Naman, a junior year college undergrad with interest in Open Source
Hardware-Software Development.

I have been actively participating in coreboot community (mainly through
the irc) for more than a month now, and have had lots of discussions with
community mentors, while setting up coreboot on QEMU. I have had success
working with basic payloads like the SeaBIOS and FILO. After having a basic
understanding about coreboot, I was fascinated to work and learn more. I
searched and found a project that I would like to do and began to draft my
proposal for it. I am planning to pursue the project "Infrastructure for
Accessing Block Devices on ARM SoCs" as a part of GSoC-2014. I have had
encouraging support from Marc and other community mentors for this.

Currently, I am in the process of drafting my proposal, and wanted some
assistance on the same.

I have been able define the goal for the project: a generic interface for
accessing block devices on ARM SoCs so that coreboot could launch its
stages from the block devices (an MMC for example). After discussions with
Alex (mrnuke), I learnt about the existing support for coreboot on
cubieboard, and hence will use this to test the interface.

I needed some assistance on methods for developing the block device
interface. One possibility is to work on the customizing uboot to our
needs. (i.e do something like this: http://linux-sunxi.org/U-Boot#SD_Card)
and create a simple API which would act as a MMC driver. I wanted to know
how could I improve upon this. Or if there are other ways to accomplish
this?

I also wanted to ask whether I need to widen the goal of the project? And
include some other functionalities? If yes, can I have some suggestions for
the same? Some possibilities could be to have the API such that it can work
in any stage (including bootblock), etc.

Hope to get a feedback on this. :)

Regards,
Naman Govil
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