[LinuxBIOS] [PATCH][LAR] New LAR access functions

Peter Stuge peter at stuge.se
Thu Jul 12 00:11:33 CEST 2007


First some general discussion. More concrete patch comments will
follow.


On Wed, Jul 11, 2007 at 12:15:17PM -0600, Jordan Crouse wrote:
> This has the slight side effect of requiring that the user specify
> a size for the LAR when they create it, but I don't think thats
> really a bad thing.
> 
> One thing you might miss is that I've turned the path name of the
> bootblock into a constant name 'bootblock'.

Some ideas have been tossed around;

1. teach lar about flash chip sector sizes
2. bootblock at top or at bottom


1 means combining flashrom and lar somehow.. Thoughts?

Unfortunately this isn't as easy as a straight modulus operation
because not all flash chips have uniform sector sizes across the
entire chip.

The only way I can see it working is to create a lar for a flash chip
rather than for a size. The flash chip id could be at the end of the
lar (we have a few bytes left right?) and lars could also be generic,
ie. not yet adapted to any chip. This generic lar is what we do right
now, with a fixed 8k-or-so sector size and a fixed total size.

We would also want a flag for each file indicating whether it can be
moved or if it must remain at it's current offset. This flag limits
which lar files can be reflashed independently by flashrom.

And we'd need to add some lar knowledge to flashrom, but only enough
to pick files out of lars.


2 depends on the target architecture. If we can autodetect we should
not make it an option, just stick with assuming top for now and fix
when it's needed.


> It also requires that the user specify a size when the LAR is
> created.

So we're approaching the flash chip. Can we do something more clever
than just specify the size already? I'm not sure. I think a fixed
size is fine for now.


//Peter




More information about the coreboot mailing list