On Tue, Mar 25, 2014 at 6:53 PM, Stefan Tauner stefan.tauner@student.tuwien.ac.at wrote:
Marc Jones has replied to my GSoC proposals but I really dislike having conversations on the GSoC website and because we will probably need to discuss more than just a few corrections, I'll reply here.
The first proposal is about the end user tool: http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/proposal/review/student/google/gsoc2014/s...
Marc commented:
What type of flash or coreboot images would you look at working with? I think that the chromebook , Intel FSP and AMD systems have a number of different blob requirements now. Would it be Intel descriptor aware? What about EFI aware?
Thank you for your questions. To be honest, I don't know the answers yet. I hope Patrick finds time to discuss this here with me in the next days/weeks so that I can write a decent specification. In general I want to investigate all possibilities to get a good overview about essential differences in the work flows and formats. That way I can make sure that even if I don't implement them all the code can be extended appropriately later.
I know the Intel layout best so far due to my work on the ich_descriptors_tool (which Stepan did not know about when he started ifdtool), and flashrom's Intel support. Unifying ifdtool and ich_descriptors_tool and making it reusable/"libify" it could be one goal of this project. Basically ifdtool supports basic r/w of Intel images while ich_descriptors_tool is r/o but dumps lots of extra information (softstraps stored in the descriptor region mostly). This is not related to the VGABIOS that is (probably?) still stored somewhere in the BIOS region? The ME and GbE regions are separate and can be copied over easily AFAIK (if they are readable that is :)
ifdtool/descriptor lib would be great to add as a goal in the application. Thanks for the clarifications. I think that this is an interesting project.
Marc