[PATCH]tinybootblock - coreboot

22 Dec 2009


      Hi,
attached patch implements my tinybootblock concept (formerly known as
newfailover) in Kconfig. It's designed to be non-instrusive, so boards
will continue to build as usual unless they're changed to use the feature.
As a proof of concept (which I used for development), emulation/qemu-x86
is changed to tinybootblock, but other boards will require more changes,
so it not a complete example on how to convert a board.
Objectives of tinybootblock (when fully implemented):
- Fix Fam10 boards on Kconfig, which require >64kb for raminit. That
should help with replacing newconfig with kconfig completely.
newconfig requires the failover mechanism on those boards to work around
this limit, and this solves it similarily by splitting the code in a
top-64k block and "the rest".
- Use CBFS
The newconfig failover mechanism uses the pre-CBFS image layout
(cat(1)ing files together and relying on magic offsets to determine
entry points). CBFS provides a clean solution for that.
- Provide a framework to build image selection logic
In newconfig, most boards have their own code to select the image. The
goal in this layout is to have generic decision routines to take care of
that, and encourage their use.
- Push as much as possible out of the bootblock
The failover mechanism so far did CAR in the bootblock and raminit in
the later stage. With tinybootblock, CAR is supposed to end up outside
the bootblock. "Safe updates", once we provide them, will be able to
update CAR support for new CPU types, too.
Code flow in tinybootblock:
- 16bit reset vector (0xfffffff0)
- jump to 32bit mode
- Do whatever is necessary to have the entire ROM around (C code,
compiled with romcc)
- Look up fallback/romstage in CBFS (this can be extended with selection
logic if desired) ("selection logic" is C, compiled with romcc, lookup
is assembly)
- Fetch the entry point which is stored in the romstage's header
- Jump to the entry point. fallback/romstage is linked for the address
where it finally resides in the image, so it's execute in place.
- fallback/romstage is the original bootblock code (except for ROM
enable): Setup CAR if available, do raminit, call coreboot_ram
Current issues:
- No support for rom enable sequences yet. QEmu doesn't need them, but
they're what I do next.
- The bootblock isn't exactly tiny, it's 64kb. Most of it is empty (on
qemu, it's ~400 used bytes including id section and reset vector, ~350
byte for all code). To be done after rom enable works.
- There might be better places to push files to (both in the sources and
in the build tree)
- There's some problem with the various section types in ELF which I
worked around in cbfstool: If the section starts earlier than the
desired load address, strip the bytes before the load address. This is
no problem in automatic operation but can have lead to mistakes in
manual operation.
Future developments:
- At some point we might want to have various variants of the bootblock:
Unconditionally loading a given romstage (what we have now), selecting
between fallback/normal by CMOS (as in newconfig), enabling a rescue
flash routine on GPIO, etc.
As mentioned, ROM enable support is still missing. Once this is done,
tinybootblock should be useful for a broader audience (eg. to port
boards), but I wanted to get the current state out now, as it finally works.
Signed-off-by: Patrick Georgi patrick.georgi@coresystems.de