Here it is: https://zirblazer.github.io/htmlfiles/coreboot.html?ver=123
I took my time to write the linked Wall of Text® with the purpose of educating/influencing Hardware enthusiasts communities about the need to push for open source Firmwares, and perhaps with even more luck, Motherboards for x86 platforms with open Hardware designs. These are my personal thoughts and nearly all the input I have on this matter.
You will notice that there is a major difference regarding my approach and nearly everyone else that you have read talking about this matter previously. I'm not of the "INTEL ME/AMD PSP VIOLATES MY PRIVACY!1!1!1" and "THE NSA AND USA GOVERMENT ARE SPYING ON ME!" crowd. I have an actual agenda regarding functional issues where I think that an open source Firmware could kick propietary Firmware butt, and I cover it with enough detail as to drive that point.
Sadly, after having spammed it around for two weeks, I got almost no feedback. I found that extremely dissapointing, as I believe that Hardware enthusiasts are perhaps the widest audience that would love to be able to freely tinker with the Firmware. I have been personally affected with Firmware related bugs, limitations or issues on all the computers I built for myself, so I fail to understand why there isn't far more people from these communities attemping to push an open source Firmware as a major Motherboard feature, more so considering how used we are to see Motherboard manufacturers failing to give the expected level of support for their products. So, when you do hit these Firmware issues, is like headbutting a solid brick wall.
Good day Zir,
It would've been helpful if your article had your e-mail in the end of it or a reply form - I've stumbled upon your article some time ago, but didn't find a quick way to share my feedback and got distracted by something else, maybe the others did too...
1) Thanks for describing CH341A, as it is a simple, reliable and affordable flashrom-supported SPI programmer. However, there's a problem that some CH341A give 5V voltage instead of 3.3V - although, as the time passes, these incorrect CH341A models will disappear, it could be worth mentioning this problem so that your reader will test the voltage of his CH341A before using it. By the way, even the "incorrect ones" may be fixed by a small hardware mod.
2) I didn't like your opinion of SeaBIOS, that it's just "mostly used to support legacy OSes and PCIe Cards with Option ROMs that have only a BIOS compatible Device Firmware." Perhaps this statement has been affected by your personal Tianocore-mostly experience - however, if you'd look at the board_status reports contributed by our community, ~90% of them have SeaBIOS as payload, and judging by the mailing list threads I find these stats pretty close to reality. SeaBIOS popularity is well justified by its' simplicity: less than 50k lines of good readable code, weights a few KB and "just works". Tianocore is quite bloated in comparison and seems to be more difficult to configure and get it working properly. Maybe that's why SeaBIOS is still a default coreboot payload - and really, there's nothing Tianocore can do that SeaBIOS theoretically couldn't. I've been using&developing coreboot for a few years and haven't found any good enough reason to switch from SeaBIOS to Tianocore. You may argue that UEFI is much more popular nowadays, however it's only because the newer PCs had UEFI preinstalled; nobody asked the people if they want UEFI or not, this choice has been kinda forced upon them. Also, I haven't encountered any UEFI-only OS yet; if such an OS would be created one day - maybe just for the purpose of being the first UEFI-only "modern OS" - well that's an intentional reduction of potential userbase for no valid technical reasons.
3) It a bit puzzles me why you didn't mention any interesting floppy-based OS like Kolibri in the "floppy part". Windows 3.1 may seem interesting, however there wouldn't be any updates or software for it, it's stuck at whatever level has been reached during its' lifetime, while a lot of the other floppy OS projects - i.e. some of those I'm offering with csb_patcher.sh script (KolibriOS, FreeDOS, MichalOS, Snowdrop, Fiwix, Memtest, Tatos, Plop, FloppyBird) - are still being developed. At least you've mentioned a FreeDOS, but there are many interesting floppy projects - including those with a minimalistic Linux environment, and PicoBSD - which haven't been mentioned even in brief. Perhaps that's because your Tianocore payload does not support the floppies, so you didn't have a chance to explore this wonderful world personally. I really feel this part is a bit short and could be really expanded. In example, if KolibriOS supports your Ethernet controller, you could access the Internet right from your BIOS and IRCC chat with your friends.
4) By attempting to stay further from "anti-spy crowd", it seems like the information security advantage of coreboot has been almost skipped - i.e. Ctrl+F by Computrace gives no results. Maybe it's not a big loss, considering this security part is well covered at the other articles - however, it may be worth considering expanding this part if you'd like your article to be truly wholesome.
5) Try to shrink your "wall of text" while preserving as much information as possible. Aside from the issues above, your article really seems great and well-written, but it takes some hard work to get through it instead of TLDR hops between the interesting parts. If you could succeed in compressing, will be much easier to read.
That's just my personal opinion, thank you for a good read and I wish you the best in your adventures.
Best regards, Mike
Mike Banon wrote:
It would've been helpful if your article had your e-mail in the end of it or a reply form - I've stumbled upon your article some time ago, but didn't find a quick way to share my feedback and got distracted by something else, maybe the others did too...
I didn't include an E-Mail because I posted this mostly in forums where other registered users could already reply in public, instead of doing so privately.
- Thanks for describing CH341A, as it is a simple, reliable and
affordable flashrom-supported SPI programmer. However, there's a problem that some CH341A give 5V voltage instead of 3.3V - although, as the time passes, these incorrect CH341A models will disappear, it could be worth mentioning this problem so that your reader will test the voltage of his CH341A before using it. By the way, even the "incorrect ones" may be fixed by a small hardware mod.
The focus was pretty much on describing the convenience of a socketed SPI Flash EEPROM and how these could be easily reflashed with an external reprogrammer, then put the CH341A as an example of how cheap and accessible those tools actually are (FAR cheaper than having to purchase a cheap Processor just to boot, and without needing fancy ECs/BMCs potentially increasing the Motherboard BoM). It was not about describing the reprogrammer itself. Also, as far that I know there are 1.8V SPI Flash EEPROMs, which requires support from the reprogrammer, too. I don't know whenever the 3.3V versions are the mainstream ones or if there are major uses for the 1.8V and 5V versions. I suppose that anyone that is actually going to use a reprogrammer will do its homework by reading any instructions and compatibility list anyways as to not screw up.
- I didn't like your opinion of SeaBIOS, that it's just "mostly used
to support legacy OSes and PCIe Cards with Option ROMs that have only a BIOS compatible Device Firmware."
Remember that I'm an almost Windows-only user. I can't see any reason why a person with a blank drive would go for BIOS-MBR instead of UEFI-GPT in a new Windows install, unless they already have a MBR formatted drive that they want to reuse without repartitioning. Also, since Windows ONLY works in these two modes, it means that if you want to use SeaBIOS because you don't like TianoCore, you're limited to MBR and its 2 TB boot disk limitation. This would work fine right now because with a rather mainstream build being a 512 GiB/1 TiB SSD plus a big HD, you could partition the SSD with MBR and install Windows in BIOS mode, whereas the big HD could be formatted as GPT and Windows could still use it for storage with no issues. In 2-3 years or so when you average SSD size is 2 TiB, SeaBIOS for bare metal Windows wouldn't cut it any longer.
- It a bit puzzles me why you didn't mention any interesting
floppy-based OS like Kolibri in the "floppy part". Windows 3.1 may seem interesting, however there wouldn't be any updates or software for it, it's stuck at whatever level has been reached during its' lifetime, while a lot of the other floppy OS projects - i.e. some of those I'm offering with csb_patcher.sh script (KolibriOS, FreeDOS, MichalOS, Snowdrop, Fiwix, Memtest, Tatos, Plop, FloppyBird) - are still being developed. At least you've mentioned a FreeDOS, but there are many interesting floppy projects - including those with a minimalistic Linux environment, and PicoBSD - which haven't been mentioned even in brief. Perhaps that's because your Tianocore payload does not support the floppies, so you didn't have a chance to explore this wonderful world personally. I really feel this part is a bit short and could be really expanded. In example, if KolibriOS supports your Ethernet controller, you could access the Internet right from your BIOS and IRCC chat with your friends.
Oh, you just made me remember the sea of hobby OSes that you could find at OSDev and FASM (Flat Assembler) Forums. Still, your average Hardware enthusiast may not even care about those if they don't do something to enchant its Windows experience, or solve a particular issue. The reason why I mentioned Windows 3.1 was because there was a recent article about it in a non-extremely-niche website, whereas I don't recall the last time I heared anything about the others if you're not looking specifically for them in places that cater to hobbyst OS developers (I did mentioned Memtest, though). Embedding FreeDOS serves a purpose: It may allow you to perform a Software flash of either your Motherboard Firmware or a PCI Card without needing to make a booteable USB Flash Drive. I suppose that you could download a binary, copy it to a local disk ESP (EFI System Partition), then use embedded FreeDOS to read the file there to flash it, or do the same with a data-only USB Flash Drive. It could be redundant if you can do the same from the EFI Shell, though, which in some Motherboards is actually embedded.
- By attempting to stay further from "anti-spy crowd", it seems like
the information security advantage of coreboot has been almost skipped
- i.e. Ctrl+F by Computrace gives no results. Maybe it's not a big
loss, considering this security part is well covered at the other articles - however, it may be worth considering expanding this part if you'd like your article to be truly wholesome.
How many people you have already read that focuses only on the security aspects of Coreboot? Pretty much all of them. I wanted to do something different, which is why I'm specifically intersecting how an open source Firmware could fix all the BIOS modding shortcomings, which is what enthusiasts have to do if they are somehow limited by their propietary Firmwares. For those that cares about the security topic, they already have plenty, if not an infinite amount of material to read. Actually, if I were to expand this, I would add even more examples of how a bad Firmware hurts general functionality (I just remembered the epidemy of bricked Samsung Notebooks due to an overfilled NVRAM some years ago, how guys involved in audio production tries to reduce DPC Latency as low as technically possible, etc). Yet, I DID tangentially touched the security topic since you have the WPBT ACPI Table, which is a potential entry point for persistent malware for anyone running Windows 8+ and is also used for tracking Software (I know nothing about Computrace, maybe it uses it).
- Try to shrink your "wall of text" while preserving as much
information as possible. Aside from the issues above, your article really seems great and well-written, but it takes some hard work to get through it instead of TLDR hops between the interesting parts. If you could succeed in compressing, will be much easier to read.
I don't think that I can shrink the text and still make it accessible enough for people that have near-zero knowledge. I introduce you to a situation, tell you why it is a problem, then how it is currently solved usually via BIOS modding, and how an open source Firmware would be a superior option.
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Mike Banon -
zir_blazer＠hotmail.com