[coreboot] Rettungsboot

[David Hendricks]

On Mon, Nov 28, 2016 at 12:40 PM, Peter Stuge <peter at stuge.se> wrote:

> David Hendricks via coreboot wrote:
> > On Sun, Nov 27, 2016 at 8:28 PM, ron minnich <rminnich at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > I like the idea of JSON file
> >
> > Now we're talkin' - A standardized data format that is human
> > readable/writeable that can be easily parsed and generated using
> > small libraries.
>
> I agree with the concept as described by David, but strongly disagree
> with choosing JSON. I think we can and should do better than that.
>

That was my initial reaction as well. But if you check out some examples it
really doesn't seem bad especially if we restrict ourselves to a subset of
JSON. Here's a simple example using key:value pairs (from
http://www.w3schools.com/js/js_json_intro.asp):
{"employees":[
    {"firstName":"John", "lastName":"Doe"},
    {"firstName":"Anna", "lastName":"Smith"},
    {"firstName":"Peter", "lastName":"Jones"}
]}

The page for jsmn notes that it explicitly does not support "advanced"
functionality that does not map well to C. I'm not sure exactly what this
implies (presumably the above example is OK), but it seems worth
investigating if it suits our needs and enables us to use existing
standards and libraries.

Ron - If you get a chance, can you post a sample JSON file from u-root?

> given that CMOS might not exist on a particular platform
> > (especially in the non-x86 world)
>
> Maybe no NVRAM, but surely there will be persistent storage on board?
>

Implementation-defined. I'm sure it exists on some designs, but in general
non-x86 board vendors don't add additional nonvolatile storage unless they
really have a specific purpose for it. Even if they add a serial EEPROM or
some such, it's not necessarily trivial to access like CMOS on x86
platforms. IMO the only persistent storage we can depend upon is the
persistent storage that coreboot resides on. Everything else is nice to
have but should not be a hard requirement.

I suppose this could be another parameter exposed in the config file in
CBFS. For example, if a key "nonvolatile-storage" has value "cmos" then the
tools know we need to look at cmos.layout and write boot device priority
using CMOS-methods. We currently do something similar to this on ChromeOS
devices to tell where verified boot data is stored (CMOS, embedded
controller, SPI ROM, etc).

-- 
David Hendricks (dhendrix)
Systems Software Engineer, Google Inc.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.coreboot.org/pipermail/coreboot/attachments/20161128/7e9f083e/attachment.html>