coreboot and brltty

[Miguel Ross]

I everyone,
    My name is Miguel I come from canada and I'm blind and I dream the day where we can access bios with a braille display.  As coreboot is a linux based bios do you thinkk that it is possible that we can integrate brltty in coreboot to permite blind peole to access the bios via a brailledisplay?

[Peter Stuge]

Hi Miguel!

Miguel Ross wrote:
> integrate brltty in coreboot

coreboot itself does not have a user interface at all. This is by
design, and the focus is on letting users run their regular operating
system as quickly as possible, because that is usually preferable.

There are also not very many settings for coreboot. Note that
coreboot does hardware initialization and nothing else. The
bootloader that will start an operating system is a separate program,
called a payload in coreboot terminology.

There are several payloads with various settings. One example is the
FILO bootloader which has some settings for boot order.

Both coreboot and payload settings are stored in NVRAM, similar to
what a factory BIOS does for many settings. As a part of the coreboot
project we have developed the utility nvramtool, which can be used to
change settings in NVRAM from within a normal Linux system.

nvramtool is a very generic tool which supports coreboot and payload
settings on coreboot-supported mainboards, but also factory BIOS
settings on all other mainboards. nvramtool uses a description file
that specifies what each bit in the 128-256 byte NVRAM means. The
tool uses a simple CLI interface, so it is hopefully useful also on
a braille display.

I believe coreboot developers generally have very little experience
with braille displays, so if you can suggest improvements that would
make our tools more accessible also to braille users then I think
that would be an amazing contribution to the project! :)

//Peter

[Carl-Daniel Hailfinger]

Hi Miguel,

On 26.02.2010 15:14, Miguel Ross wrote:
> access bios with a braille display.

coreboot does not have any user interface or BIOS screen during boot, so
blind and seeing people can't access it anyway.

coreboot supports something we call payloads. A payload can be a boot
loader or a configuration screen or a memory tester or a BIOS emulator
or some other software. The payload is the first chance to interact with
the system, so brltty would have to be implemented in the payload.
If you only want to change BIOS settings, you can do that with nvramtool
from a Linux command line. I do not know if nvramtool works with brltty.
It would be great if you could provide feedback for nvramtool so that we
can make sure that it works fine for blind users.

Regards,
Carl-Daniel

[Rudolf Marek]

I would say better would be to ask Kevin to add support to SeaBIOS because I 
think this is the place where coreboot is to be seen by users ;)

Rudolf