[coreboot] Rebuilding coreboot image generation

[Kevin O'Connor]

On Thu, Nov 05, 2015 at 12:42:02PM +0100, Patrick Georgi wrote:
> Hey coreboot folks,
> 
> I'm looking for an approach to make building Chrome OS style coreboot
> images easier to do with regular coreboot tools, instead of the rather
> large post-processing pipeline we have in the Chrome OS build system.
> 
> The rationale is that we also push the Chrome OS capabilities (eg.
> verified boot) upstream, and actually using them shouldn't depend on
> checking out yet another custom build environment.
> 
> I wrote a proposal on how to do that, which can be found and commented
> at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1o2bFl5HCHDFPccQsOwa-75A8TWojjFiGK3r0yeIc7Vo/edit

It seems to me that similar functionality could be obtained by
enhancing (or replacing) cbfstool.  If possible, that seems simpler
than adding a new tool, a new custom language, and a new layer to the
build.

For example, instead of a "Chipset manifest" file, I think one could
run commands like:

$ cbfs2tool coreboot.rom add-region "IFD" --start=0 --end=4K
$ cbfs2tool coreboot.rom add-raw build/ifd.bin --region="IFD" --align=bottom --empty=0xff
$ cbfs2tool coreboot.rom add-region "ME" --start=4K --end=4M
...

The above would require cbfstool (or its replacement) to track some
additional metadata (either in the rom itself or in a similarly named
file).  However, that seems simpler than introducing a new tool.

Just my $.02
-Kevin