[coreboot] On loongson CPU or MIPS ARCH

ron minnich rminnich at gmail.com
Mon Apr 29 05:21:11 CEST 2013


On Sun, Apr 28, 2013 at 7:24 PM, Vladimir 'φ-coder/phcoder' Serbinenko
<phcoder at gmail.com> wrote:

> Could we have a sane discussion about why it's not suitable for this or
> that scenario and what would need to be fixed? Not just quasi-fanatical
> "I don't want it".

I guess I missed the part where not wanting something was considered insane.

"I don't want bubble and squeak for dinner again" "You are insane!"

"I don't want American Beer" "you are insane!"

You see where this leads :-)

Anyway ... one example where GRUB doesn't work for us. One of many.
Chromebooks use a boot system called depthcharge, which is a coreboot
payload. It forms a chain of verified boot from the coreboot romstage
to the kernel. There's a lot of careful work that has gone into that
design and implementation, involving balancing the efficiency of the
hashing algorithms at various steps, how the TPM plays into it, and so
on. It's quite hard to get this right. Nobody I know is interested in
plugging it all into grub. You're welcome to go for it, of course, I'd
love to see it happen.

As it happens, I worked with Ollie Lo, years back, on an x86 system in
which we got ram working in < 200 instructions. In the end, it was
still useful to put that into a coreboot (a.k.a. linuxbios) framework,
because it got us huge flexibility in terms of what we did on the
platform.

So, all that said, the answer still is "I am going to try to look at
this code and see if a coreboot port makes sense". I understand what
the U in grub stands for, and it's not "universal". And I don't see
the harm in trying it out.

thanks

ron



More information about the coreboot mailing list