[coreboot] GSoC 2010

[Joseph Smith]

On Mon, 8 Mar 2010 16:04:31 -0800, Ed Swierk <eswierk at aristanetworks.com>
wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 6, 2010 at 8:13 AM, Carl-Daniel Hailfinger
> <c-d.hailfinger.devel.2006 at gmx.net> wrote:
>> 2. Tiny flashrom stub for remote flashing over serial/network/whatever
>> (~10 kB uncompressed and 3 kB lzma compressed, maybe even smaller).
>> 3. Load flashrom from an external medium (serial/USB/floppy/whatever) to
>> RAM and execute it (no space requirements).
>> ...
>> Variant 2 is essentially a stripped down SerialICE with one or two extra
>> commands. Rather slow, but you can upgrade the controlling flashrom app
>> on the master computer (and test patches) without having to mess with
>> the contents of the flash in the slave (to be reflashed) computer.
>> Besides that, it allows even such stuff as PCI card reflashing (for gPXE
>> and stuff).
>> Variant 3 has a high initial load time, but flashing will be fast. No
>> guarantees on how to recover if flashrom crashes or exits prematurely,
>> though.
> 
> I implemented a little hack a while ago that let you download a
> payload via xmodem over serial:
> 
> http://www.coreboot.org/pipermail/coreboot/2006-October/016120.html
> 
> It looks like most of the code has since vanished, but the
> xmodemReceive() function is still there, and might be useful for some
> kind of last-ditch failover mechanism.
> 
We also have a small program on Set-Top-Linux to send flash commands to the
original bios over Serial Console:


http://www.settoplinux.org/index.php?title=RCA_RM4100:Howto_coreboot_and_Linux#Flash_the_bios

You just copy bios image to drive, boot, and flash over serial console.
It may be nothing, but it could be a start to something that could be used
for recovery???


-- 
Thanks,
Joseph Smith
Set-Top-Linux
www.settoplinux.org