Hi Gerd,
Hmm, this adds more confusion rather than avoids it.
Sorry about this... Any suggestions?
So, this clearly does access the cmos (with "cmos" meaning "the nv
storage of the rtc chip").
That is correct.
I have to agree with Kevin that storing config data in cmos is a bad
idea. It's not reliable. Also there isn't much space. The bootorder file is not designed to be space efficient and can be relatively large. There is a reason why UEFI goes store configuration data (aka EFI variables) in flash instead.
I beg to differ. We have in fact been storing config data in the NVRAM pretty much from the beginning. It was fine then, and it is still fine now. coreboot is doing it with no issue.
The bootorder setup on NVRAM is definitely far from optimal with the implementation included in the patch, but it would serve as a milestone, from which we can improve upon (e.g. have it compressed, or have a more efficient format).
Last but not least, it will always fallback to the original CBFS based bootorder behavior in the event that the NVRAM one is invalid or non-existent. If one don't like the NVRAM config, they can simply not have it in the NVRAM.
Please consider integrating this change.
Regards, Timothy Kenno Handojo