Thanks to the tireless efforts of Uwe and with the assistance of Ward and Marc, libpayload and coreinfo are fully up to date and feature-filled, and now an option in buildrom. Libpayload is the backend for two working payloads (coreinfo and tint) and more on the way.
It is now time to start considering the next great payload challenge. Immediately after I demonstrated coreinfo to Ron, he said - "okay, now we need a chooser". And the thing about Ron is, when he is right, he is right. A master payload to chose and load other payloads is the next great step in our effort. Originally we had only discussed a menu based chooser, but recently many people have told me how they would like to see a loader that could chain multiple payloads together in order to cobble together a reasonable facsimile of a traditional BIOS setup screen.
The more I have thought about this, the more I think that this effort is key to proving (and improving) the stability and versatility of coreboot-v3. It will also force us to examine much of our current implementation, which is not a bad thing. So, short story long, I have written down the evolving ideas in my head and the resulting roadmap here:
"Bayou" is the working name for the project - visit the page to find out why.
This is also going to involve a new loader format that we discussed at the summit:
Please critically review both and post comments here or in the discussion pages.
Thanks! Jordan
PS: I very nearly called it 'corechooser' as a joke, but I think that would have caused Peter to track me down and hunt me for sport.