[coreboot] [PATCH]Remove non-CBFS

[Kevin O'Connor]

On Wed, Sep 30, 2009 at 04:26:44PM -0700, ron minnich wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 30, 2009 at 4:23 PM, Kevin O'Connor <kevin at koconnor.net> wrote:
> > What's the use case for normal/failover?  I always envisioned it as a
> > software implementation of a "bios savior".  If so, building in a
> > serialice shell might be a simpler solution.
> >
> > Am I missing an important use-case?
> 
> I'm flashing 1024 machines. power fails midway through. bad.

Ouch.  So, I guess we're saying it's a software "bios savior" that
doesn't require one to go hitting 1000 switches?

As an aside, to protect against a power failure, flashrom is going to
need to know that it shouldn't reflash the "fallback" parts of the
image.

> I flash a new bios that has worked in test. It fails on 10% of the
> machines, in ways that could not be predicted because 10% of my
> machines
> have a manufacturing defect. This is what happened to me. Fallback saved me.

Ouch - I guess hooking up a serialice console to 100 machines isn't an
appealing alternative.

Just to throw my 2cents in -- the coreboot fallback/normal thing has
been thoroughly confusing to me.  If this is being re-implemented it
would be nice to see this done in a way that makes sense to users.

One suggestion I have - assuming my "bios savior" analogy is correct -
would be to truly break up the fallback and normal parts.  A user that
wants fallback/normal should download two separate copies of
coreboot-v2 into two separate directories, and then run "make config ;
make" in both separate directories.  The "normal" config would take
the directory location of the "fallback" cbfs image, copy it into its
local directory, and then just add the cbfs files it needs.

In particular, I'd like to be able to go into my "normal" directory
and run "svn up", "make", and then "flashrom" - and be fairly
confident that I didn't just blow up my image.  As near as I can tell,
the current fallback/normal thing recompiles both fallback and normal
images, and there's a pretty good chance that both images are hosed
when code changes are made.  (Of course, as I said before,
fallback/normal has me perplexed, so maybe I just missed the boat.)

-Kevin