[coreboot] GSoC 2010

[Ed Swierk]

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.

--Ed