On 20.03.2014 11:25, Allen Yan wrote:
Hi, David, When at AsusTek Suzhou, my work is mainly responsible for bios porting and fixing bug. There were four mainboards P5KPL-S, P5QL-E, P5QL-SE, P5QL. All based on Intel platform and AMI Legacy BIOS Core In the second half year of 2008, I worked on pre-development of EFI-BIOS for ASUS mainboard. I wrote a Dual bootblock module and added NTFS support(read only) for AutoRecovery module using AMI Apito platform (based on EFI).
Do I understand it correctly, that you've had access to proprietary BIOS code? If so which papers did you sign and under what license did you get them? Depending on the answers it may partially or fully disqualify you from contributing to coreboot.
Interesting experience, but memories will fade! Details can't be remembered clearly.
As Vladimir said, if the chipset is unsupported then writing MRC for it will be a very long and difficult process. If the chipset is supported then adding mainboard support may be a relatively simple task that not sufficient for GSoC.
Do we need to write MRC by ourselves in coreboot? Isn't MRC code supported by Intel?
If you have experience with UEFI, perhaps you can implement features that are missing in our Tianocore support: http://www.coreboot.org/TianoCore .
Implementing UEFI CBFS driver and GOP driver are very clear goal. questions: I don't know whether coreboot or some payload implement common flash interface for flash programming software. If not, why?
It seems that Tiano payload is a very activity project. I think I can try my best to implement one feature or twp for the project! Like use a seperate Fv in CBFS as Fault Tolerant Variable Storage
Look forward to your kind advice!
On 3/20/14, David Hendricks dhendrix@google.com wrote:
Hi Jinyi, Can you provide more details about your work as a BIOS engineer?
As Vladimir said, if the chipset is unsupported then writing MRC for it will be a very long and difficult process. If the chipset is supported then adding mainboard support may be a relatively simple task that not sufficient for GSoC.
If you have experience with UEFI, perhaps you can implement features that are missing in our Tianocore support: http://www.coreboot.org/TianoCore .
On Wed, Mar 19, 2014 at 6:06 AM, Allen Yan lexkde@gmail.com wrote:
Hi, I am Jinyi Yan , a second year PhD candidate from Shanghai Institute of Micro-system and Information Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. I used to be a mainboard BIOS engineer in ASUS Technology Suzhou Co., Ltd for about two years (2007.7~2009.2). My major now is optoelectronics. But I have a lot of fun while programming, in my heart the working experience of being a BIOS engineer is still very exciting. I think GsoC is a nice platform for me to participate the open source community. When I search the GsoC projects and organizations, the coreboot and flashrom projects are definitely the right choices for me. I have a spare ASUS P5KPL PC at my hand, but the chipset is not in the support list of coreboot project. As Stefan Tauner's suggestion, maybe porting coreboot to new mainboard or implementing advanced coreboot features on exsiting mainboards are nice too. Now I'm not very familiar with the program structure of coreboot, so I expect your guidence and hope to contribute for coreboot and flashrom even if my application is not accpeted. Thanks! Look forward to your kind advice! Regards, Jinyi Yan
-- coreboot mailing list: coreboot@coreboot.org http://www.coreboot.org/mailman/listinfo/coreboot
-- David Hendricks (dhendrix) Systems Software Engineer, Google Inc.
Vladimir 'φ-coder/phcoder' Serbinenko wrote:
On 20.03.2014 11:25, Allen Yan wrote:
Hi, David, When at AsusTek Suzhou, my work is mainly responsible for bios porting and fixing bug.
Do I understand it correctly, that you've had access to proprietary BIOS code? If so which papers did you sign and under what license did you get them?
Vladimir, I would assume that Jinyi signed a standard employment agreement. Employment agreements contain a non-disclure clause which covers all non-public information which the employer has received from suppliers and customers.
Depending on the answers it may partially or fully disqualify you from contributing to coreboot.
I disagree, and I think your tone is rude.
Please be supportive of GSoC candidates who are showing an interest in coreboot, especially candidates such as Jinyi who can obviously contribute with significant relevant experience from the firmware domain.
Employment agreements have clauses about not working on competing products. coreboot in summer of 2014 does not compete with BIOS for commercial mainboards in 2008. I am obviously not a lawyer but I can not see a problem here.
//Peter
On 20.03.2014 13:45, Peter Stuge wrote:
Vladimir 'φ-coder/phcoder' Serbinenko wrote:
On 20.03.2014 11:25, Allen Yan wrote:
Hi, David, When at AsusTek Suzhou, my work is mainly responsible for bios porting and fixing bug.
Do I understand it correctly, that you've had access to proprietary BIOS code? If so which papers did you sign and under what license did you get them?
Vladimir, I would assume that Jinyi signed a standard employment agreement. Employment agreements contain a non-disclure clause which covers all non-public information which the employer has received from suppliers and customers.
Depending on the answers it may partially or fully disqualify you from contributing to coreboot.
I disagree, and I think your tone is rude.
I didn't mean to be rude. I apologise if it sounded like this. I'm somewhat pessimistic generally and a mathematician and so I look for problems first.
Please be supportive of GSoC candidates who are showing an interest in coreboot, especially candidates such as Jinyi who can obviously contribute with significant relevant experience from the firmware domain.
I didn't mean to be dismissive, when I discuss problems it's to prevent and fix them.
Employment agreements have clauses about not working on competing products. coreboot in summer of 2014 does not compete with BIOS for commercial mainboards in 2008. I am obviously not a lawyer but I can not see a problem here.
They sometimes also have draconian non-disclosure parts. We can't know until such issues are checked by someone qualified. I'm not. Does coreboot has some kind of experts it can use for those cases? On GNU projects I'd refer to copyright clerk who would in turn refer further if needed.
//Peter
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Peter Stuge -
Vladimir 'φ-coder/phcoder' Serbinenko