Re: [coreboot] [GSoC 2016] ROM-O-Matic project

[Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli]

On Wed, 09 Mar 2016 04:24:04 +0000
ron minnich  wrote:
> yeah, we had something like this in the linuxbios days. I think you
> don't want to build it on demand, but rather have a bunch of
> pre-built images that are known good.

Once we get reproducible builds, we could:
1) Store an (SHA) hash of images in board-status.
2) Make the rom-o-matic build (with the board-status configs) and
   verify(checksums) the image of a known good state.

That would still not guarantee that the given image would work on every
variation of a given device[1], but that would still be better than the
current status today.

References:
-----------
[1]I'm thinking of mainboards supporting several CPU families: In that
   case the rom-o-matic would somehow need to inform the user about the
   tested configuration. RAM sizes and modules also often varies
   between users.

Denis.

[GSoC 2016] ROM-O-Matic project

[ron minnich]

On Thu, Mar 17, 2016 at 1:08 PM Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli 
wrote:
> Once we get reproducible builds, we could:
> Store an (SHA) hash of images in board-status.
> Make the rom-o-matic build (with the board-status configs) and
> verify(checksums) the image of a known good state.

I really like this idea. I wonder if we could add additional information
for a board, derived from, say, pci tree, dmidecode, that kind of thing,
that would be used to characterize a board.

ron