[coreboot] [RFC] A more robust fallback system

Patrick Georgi patrick at georgi-clan.de
Tue Nov 15 21:43:47 CET 2011


Hello Noé,

first, welcome to the coreboot community!

Am 15.11.2011 12:07, schrieb Noé Rubinstein:
> system, by putting a 'fallback' Coreboot in the high, write-blocked part
> of the boot ROM, and using the fallback mechanism already implemented in
> Coreboot in order to fallback in case the user-flashed firmware does not
> work.
Why put the fallback in the high parts? The only reason I could find is 
that you intend to use a boot block protection scheme (as these provide 
protection only for some high region), but they usually cover only a 
rather small area - too small for coreboot.
> found with the right name.  That's why the fallback mechanism has to
> search for the fallback image only in the high part of the RAM.  That
> requires modification of walkcbfs_asm and of cbfslib to be able to find
> a file after an offset.
> [...]
> overwrite part of another file.  On the contrary, when looking for a
> fallback component, the file headers before the fallback offset should
> not be trusted (that's the whole point), so the beginning of the ROM
> should be entirely skipped.
These two special cases can be dropped if fallback is aligned to the low 
end of the image: It's always encountered first, and the CBFS alignment 
data is protected, too.


I'm snipping away your other proposals for now. The reason is that there 
are various projects out there that use coreboot and have safe updates 
on their agenda, and I'd rather have a complete set of constraints (eg. 
limitations due to flash chips that only provide boot block protection) 
before planning what to do about them.


Patrick




More information about the coreboot mailing list