Peter Stuge wrote:
On Sat, Feb 09, 2008 at 09:34:55PM +0000, Brendan Trotter wrote:
Sorry for the interruption, but...
All input is valuable!
On 2/9/08, ron minnich rminnich@gmail.com wrote: There's only 2 things coreboot is missing. The first is an inbuilt "update payload from <device>" utility
This is basically the problem of flash chips still being too small.
The second thing that's missing is a "payload specification"
This has come up before. We would very much appreciate help from anyone who has ideas about such a specification.
Any self-contained ELF file will naturally do. The flexibility of the approach is the lack of a more restricting specification.
I agree we should specify the coreboot table format in a formal document. And we should provide "libpayload.a" to provide functions such as coreboot table reading, cmos access, ram detection, console detection, ...
I don't think this is really possible though. Even the C programming language changes over time. I agree with you that specifications should be very stable, but I believe it is impossible to create one that "always" works. At some point this will become a re-invention of OpenFirmware. Please prove me wrong though! :)
If we want to push coreboot on another level, we should make substantial changes to the coreboot table datastructure with the advent of v3. This includes exporting the device tree in the cbtable (or the other way round?) coreboot really should tell anyone reading the cbtable all that it knows about a given machine.
Stefan
//Peter