Hi everyone,
I will attempt to participate as a student again - and of course my project should be something very closely related to flashrom to exploit my knowledge in that area.
I have already submitted a first alpha-stage proposal that basically includes the standard repertoire of things I do while working on flashrom in general, and also which I ended up doing in the past GSoC projects. Namely a mixture of maintenance, improvement and integration of existing patches, development of new features for flashrom. For me that worked out well and I believe it was very good for flashrom and worthwhile for the coreboot community as a whole too. I have not received too much feedback so I am not sure if everybody agrees with that and thinks that another such summer would be a good thing as well (if there are other candidates and/or proposals to choose from).
If you think the GSoC slots of coreboot deserve something better, or more project-like then I could also try to work on something more confined/focused. There are a number of project ideas that might fit my profile quite well.
The "End user flash tool" proposal would allow me to eventually finish libflashrom and the layout patches, maybe clean up the bios_extract repository and help those users that are fighting with vgabios extractions etc. :)
Then there is the panic room idea which AFAIK is not finished and has some room for improvements, but I am not sure about its current state and if Kyösti wants to work on that this year...?
Somehow related to both points above is an idea for a project I had for some time. A coreboot payload (probably)... for user flash updates that verifies a cryptographically signed image before flashing it. While currently this is relatively useless it might become interesting for distributing libreboot binary images for example. (even though I have to admit it is a bit ironic to ship binary images of a firmware that is blobfree :) IIRC the Chromebooks have a write-protected primary loader that verifies the remaining firmware etc... basically what secure boot demands. That solves a similar problem, but recovery for an end user is way more unpleasant than getting warned early before any modifications are done. Another advantage would be to have an OS-independent update mechanism... OTOH flashrom runs on every OS I deem worthy to run coreboot. :)
The last project idea to be mentioned here that suits me well is what David proposed last year, see his post for details: http://www.flashrom.org/pipermail/flashrom/2013-March/010704.html
So... I would be glad to get your feedback. What do you think would help us most? Do you have other ideas/wishes related to flashrom?
I don't care too much on which project I work... they are all worthwhile IMHO. My preference would be to work freely on flashrom itself because it really needs it (there is no one else doing it) and I have the most knowledge in that field. But OTOH I can learn much more in every other project mentioned above and that's also very motivating. Naturally, I don't want to write multiple proposals if we can agree on one topic already... and time is rather short too :)
PS: I have an asrock imb-180-h, an SPI programmer and lots of flash chips available to tinker with. There is also some ancient intel BX-based PC somewhere that I could port... I'd need to build a parallel flasher for that first though (cortex m3 board and stuff already collecting dust...) but that would probably be based on serprog and peter would veto for sure ;)