On Sun, Nov 27, 2016 at 8:28 PM, ron minnich <rminnich@gmail.com> wrote:

yeah, david and nico both make very good points. I like the idea of JSON file, and further we're working on a Go program
on the u-root project that would parse said file (trivial in Go to parse JSON, it's one statement and blam! your Go struct is all
filled in) and then decide what to configure/what to download/how to validate (we have a gpgv command written in Go by
Eric Grosse) and then how to kexec it.

I think what we're doing might be useful?

Now we're talkin' - A standardized data format that is human readable/writeable that can be easily parsed and generated using small libraries. It looks like Go can already handle it easily, for C we could maybe use JSMN (http://zserge.com/jsmn.html) or something similar. I think that addresses Nico's first point.

For the other points, I imagine we'd have two varieties of the JSON file. One would be generated along with the payload and included as a CBFS file to specify things like capabilities and bootable device priority*. The other would be on the bootable media and specify things like the kernel path and parameters. A tool which is used to generate the latter would verify the capabilities and warn the user if their coreboot payload lacks support for something.

*Stuff like boot device priority might need some more thought since CMOS may be a preferable way of controlling something like that. However given that CMOS might not exist on a particular platform (especially in the non-x86 world) replacing the config file in CBFS file might not be a bad way to go.

David Hendricks (dhendrix)
Systems Software Engineer, Google Inc.