On 8/31/07, todthgie todthgie@hotmail.com wrote:
----- Original Message ----- From: "Corey Osgood" corey.osgood@gmail.com To: "Darmawan Salihun" darmawan.salihun@gmail.com Cc: "linuxbios" linuxbios@linuxbios.org Sent: Thursday, August 30, 2007 00:07 Subject: Re: [LinuxBIOS] [RFC] Call for Action: LinuxBIOS foundations
Darmawan Salihun wrote:
On 8/29/07, *Uwe Hermann* <uwe@hermann-uwe.de mailto:uwe@hermann-uwe.de> wrote:
The real problems (in my view) are: 1. Lack of developers 2. Lack of time 3. Lack of proper datasheets (for some/many chipsets) Issue 2 cannot be solved easily, issue 3 depends on many factors we usually cannot influence a lot, but issue 1 is where we can get the biggest gain, IMHO.I wonder if clean-room reverse engineering on commercial BIOS that
comes
with the board can help for case 3 because most of them have a
"generic"
code to boot the machine until preliminary RAM test. Personally, I view it as a *very interesting* challenge.
Very interesting, yes, but that routes directly back to problem 1. More developers could lead the creation of a separate project with that goal in mind, but for now everyone's working with what they have. If we had more people/time, such things might be feasible and very beneficial.
suggestion: make a tool based that emits a trace of whats going on ... i would suggest first making a tool for extracting award flash enables....
-Todthgie
I think it's not too hard. I would need to create an IDA Pro plugin or IDA Python script that can search for the binary signatures that of interest. I have some preliminary code for different task that I think can be used for that once I'm working on it ;-). It may be just too premature to talk about it right now.
Regards,
Darmawan Salihun -------------------------------------------------------------------- -= Human knowledge belongs to the world =-