[coreboot] How do I configure coreboot at runtime?

ron minnich rminnich at gmail.com
Mon Dec 14 19:07:26 CET 2009


going back to the beginnings, our intent in 1999 was that if you
needed to configure at boot time, well, you'd drop into a linux shell
and do it. Remember, we were booting into linux from flash at that
point. We even demonstrated overclocking and other such tricks by
dropping into a shell and running commands. At one point I had a patch
for Linux that would drop you into a bash *before* running init. We
could drop into bash, run some commands, and enable overclocking. This
could all be done without even having spun up the hard drive!

So, our configuration interface was bash and /dev. Nowadays it might
include /sys.

With the monstrous growth in Linux size and complexity, it's become
clear that linux-as-bootloader (or bios) is a non-working idea for
many people, even those who in the early days really liked the idea.
I've come to wonder if serialice might make a very nice bootup shell
for coreboot.The beauty of serialice is that it is designed for other
user or program control. That's very important.

 The idea is something like this:

coreboot starts up into serialice.
serialice has the option, maybe set via cmos, of booting into coreboot
immediately or waiting for interaction
via keyboard/serial/whatever.
User or program interacts with serialice and then continues the bios startup

This could be pretty interesting, would require the ability to build
serialice, coreboot, and maybe seabios into one image.

ron




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