going back to the beginnings, our intent in 1999 was that if you needed to configure at boot time, well, you'd drop into a linux shell and do it. Remember, we were booting into linux from flash at that point. We even demonstrated overclocking and other such tricks by dropping into a shell and running commands. At one point I had a patch for Linux that would drop you into a bash *before* running init. We could drop into bash, run some commands, and enable overclocking. This could all be done without even having spun up the hard drive!
So, our configuration interface was bash and /dev. Nowadays it might include /sys.
With the monstrous growth in Linux size and complexity, it's become clear that linux-as-bootloader (or bios) is a non-working idea for many people, even those who in the early days really liked the idea. I've come to wonder if serialice might make a very nice bootup shell for coreboot.The beauty of serialice is that it is designed for other user or program control. That's very important.
The idea is something like this:
coreboot starts up into serialice. serialice has the option, maybe set via cmos, of booting into coreboot immediately or waiting for interaction via keyboard/serial/whatever. User or program interacts with serialice and then continues the bios startup
This could be pretty interesting, would require the ability to build serialice, coreboot, and maybe seabios into one image.
ron