[coreboot] [PATCH] xcshell: serial shell for early debugging
Carl-Daniel Hailfinger
c-d.hailfinger.devel.2006 at gmx.net
Tue Jul 14 21:51:51 CEST 2009
On 14.07.2009 18:55, Michael Gold wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 14, 2009 at 08:38:15 -0700, ron minnich wrote:
>
>> I like it. We talked about something like this in v3. How would you
>> feel about putting in emergency flash upgrade support :-)
>>
>
> I like the flash upgrade idea, but I'm not sure how to do it yet (in a
> generic way). Any suggestions?
>
If you have RAM, downloading a flashrom binary linked against libpayload
would be best. The good news is that flashrom itself is written in a way
that allows you to put it on top of any backend, even a backend which
does nothing but perform remote control of xcshell. I think that would
be easiest.
> I think it might be possible without any changes by marking the part of
> the ROM containing xcshell as cacheable, and then using pokes to rewrite
> the rest of the chip. It would be slow, but a small flash upgrade
> program could be uploaded that would do the rest of the work more
> quickly.
>
If you have a generic "write X to loation y" interface, flashrom can
deal with that, even remotely.
> My original idea was that one would set up CAR, upload code, and jump to
> it; this would allow the system to be extended without having to include
> much code. It doesn't work, at least on my Pentium 3, but the same
> thing could be done with RAM once it's initialised (or with flash for
> occasional use).
>
As long as RAM works, we could even upload a complete flashrom binary
over zmodem.
Regards,
Carl-Daniel
--
http://www.hailfinger.org/
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