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. So I consider the flashrom project is the better choice. I also have a home-made flash programmer based on uspasp. I'd like to choose “Locking and unlocking of access protections of flash chips” for GSoC 2014. Now I'm not very familiar with the program structure of flashrom, so I expect your guidence and hope to contribute for flashrom and coreboot even if my application is not accpeted. Thanks! Look forward to your kind advice! Regards, Jinyi Yan
On Mon, 17 Mar 2014 09:56:43 +0800 严进一 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. So I consider the flashrom project is the better choice. I also have a home-made flash programmer based on uspasp. I'd like to choose “Locking and unlocking of access protections of flash chips” for GSoC 2014. Now I'm not very familiar with the program structure of flashrom, so I expect your guidence and hope to contribute for flashrom and coreboot even if my application is not accpeted. Thanks! Look forward to your kind advice!
Hello Jinyi,
thanks for your interest in flashrom. I have been the most active flashrom developer in the last years and would probably be responsible to integrate your work and answer questions if you get stuck. I agree that the coreboot-related projects are probably the best choice for you (there are not many low-level projects participating sadly... that's how I ended up here too ;). I also have to admit that the P5KPL is probably not very helpful AFAICT. But I don't think that this is a show stopper regarding coreboot (or seabios) projects and that your skills and insights obtained at ASUS regarding x86 might be more useful in a non-flashrom project. Also, the project you chose requires to understand two code bases ("ours" and that maintained by google/ chromiumos ppl) and interact with two communities and persuade at least one of them that your solution is sound and profitable. On the other hand, I am biased because I will apply for a flashrom GSoC project myself probably. ;) The code bases have a very similar core so that should not be a big issue at all. Producing something that will be praised by everyone on the other hand is really hard. The vanilla flashrom community is traditionally very (very) picky regarding changes, especially user interface changes. This is also the reason why there is a chromiumos fork of flashrom...
I have talked to David (dhendrix) and he is willing to mentor you this year. If you want to pursue this project (and the patch you sent seems to indicate that ;) I suggest you talk to him directly about details of the assignment (here or on IRC).
Adding new flash chips as you have done is a very good first step to get to know flashrom a bit better. The fun begins with the awkward models though :) I suggest you test flashrom on any hardware available to you (including network cards for example)... there is always room for improvement and learning a foreign code base is always easier when on has a specific goal to reach.
Hi, David, I was reading flashrom code base following the internal programmer way. I also read mail "http://www.flashrom.org/pipermail/flashrom/2013-March/010704.html" and checked the Ibex peak datasheet about ME firmware. Here are some questions: about "Locking and unlocking of access protections of flash chips" 1 which mechanism locks the flash?a software way or a hardware way by the programmer. As in the Atmel AT25DL161, the protection ways are "hardware protection, using WP pin", "Sector lockdown with permanent freeze option", "individual sector protection with global protect/unprotect feature". 2 Does this problem concerns the ME firmware issue. 3 How to do the test? Is the test at specific mainboard and flash chip enough? 4 How to value the work at last as stefan mentioned in the suggestion?
Actually, a little frustrating after I saw stefanct's mail. On 3/18/14, Stefan Tauner stefan.tauner@student.tuwien.ac.at wrote:
On Mon, 17 Mar 2014 09:56:43 +0800 严进一 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. So I consider the flashrom project is the better choice. I also have a home-made flash programmer based on uspasp. I'd like to choose “Locking and unlocking of access protections of flash chips” for GSoC 2014. Now I'm not very familiar with the program structure of flashrom, so I expect your guidence and hope to contribute for flashrom and coreboot even if my application is not accpeted. Thanks! Look forward to your kind advice!
Hello Jinyi,
thanks for your interest in flashrom. I have been the most active flashrom developer in the last years and would probably be responsible to integrate your work and answer questions if you get stuck. I agree that the coreboot-related projects are probably the best choice for you (there are not many low-level projects participating sadly... that's how I ended up here too ;). I also have to admit that the P5KPL is probably not very helpful AFAICT. But I don't think that this is a show stopper regarding coreboot (or seabios) projects and that your skills and insights obtained at ASUS regarding x86 might be more useful in a non-flashrom project. Also, the project you chose requires to understand two code bases ("ours" and that maintained by google/ chromiumos ppl) and interact with two communities and persuade at least one of them that your solution is sound and profitable. On the other hand, I am biased because I will apply for a flashrom GSoC project myself probably. ;) The code bases have a very similar core so that should not be a big issue at all. Producing something that will be praised by everyone on the other hand is really hard. The vanilla flashrom community is traditionally very (very) picky regarding changes, especially user interface changes. This is also the reason why there is a chromiumos fork of flashrom...
I have talked to David (dhendrix) and he is willing to mentor you this year. If you want to pursue this project (and the patch you sent seems to indicate that ;) I suggest you talk to him directly about details of the assignment (here or on IRC).
Adding new flash chips as you have done is a very good first step to get to know flashrom a bit better. The fun begins with the awkward models though :) I suggest you test flashrom on any hardware available to you (including network cards for example)... there is always room for improvement and learning a foreign code base is always easier when on has a specific goal to reach. -- Kind regards/Mit freundlichen Grüßen, Stefan Tauner
flashrom mailing list flashrom@flashrom.org http://www.flashrom.org/mailman/listinfo/flashrom
-
Allen Yan -
Stefan Tauner -
严进一