How do I configure coreboot at runtime?

[Ikem Krueger]

Hi folks. I'm curious. How do I configure coreboot at runtime? I mean,
is there a gui like I know from BIOS or EFI?

[Harald Gutmann]

On Sunday 13 December 2009 20:52:19 Ikem Krueger wrote:
> Hi folks. I'm curious. How do I configure coreboot at runtime? I mean,
> is there a gui like I know from BIOS or EFI?

No, there is at the moment no such UI for coreboot directly.
Seabios offers, as far as I know the possibility to change the boot device at 
"runtime". I don't know if Seabios saves that changes to CMOS or if it looses 
that setting after a fresh boot.

But do you need such a configuration (except the boot device)?
As most of the hardware initialization is done by the operating system 
hardware drivers, I don't see a real *need* for configuring coreboot after 
compile-time.

Kind regards,
Harald

[ron minnich]

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