[coreboot] Rebuilding coreboot image generation

Patrick Georgi pgeorgi at google.com
Mon Nov 9 22:36:43 CET 2015


2015-11-09 21:47 GMT+01:00 Julius Werner <jwerner at chromium.org>:
> If Intel's architectural requirements force us to have a component
> that must be linked at an exact spot in the image, I think it would
> only be consistent to use the tool that we have which is meant for
> these sorts of things... FMAP.
It must be linked to the location it was relocated to. That could even
change over time. Just like x86s execute-in-place romstage.

Updates may end up at a different location, and they will likely have
a different size. For all we know, updates may grow beyond the space
we reserve for FSP in FMAP (which is read-only on Chromebooks). It
would be unfortunate to have empty space, just in the wrong region,
and run into problems doing an update because of that.

I don't think the layout constraints we can impose on files in CBFS
are much of a problem, and there's not much overlap: As I understand
things, FMAP exists for higher-order partitioning; for things that the
current instance of coreboot need not to care about, like a separate
copy of coreboot in flash, or chipset data that is none of the CPU
firmware's business (ME and the like). FMAP is also suitable for
writable fixed-size sections (like MRC cache) that we want to keep far
away from the CBFS chain.

The other reason (besides file constraints) for this proposal is to
enable the payload's build system to describe the files they need to
add to CBFS themselves (and without knowing which FMAP regions the
payload needs to end up in). depthcharge definitely needs something
along those lines so we can get rid of that spaghetti code that is
bundle_firmware.py. I think grub2 (and to some degree, seabios) could
also benefit from dealing with their configuration files themselves in
a structured way.


Patrick
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