[coreboot] Management engine firmware

Vladimir 'φ-coder/phcoder' Serbinenko phcoder at gmail.com
Sat Jun 15 01:32:02 CEST 2013


On 15.06.2013 00:18, Paul Menzel wrote:
> Am Donnerstag, den 13.06.2013, 09:49 +0200 schrieb Vladimir 'φ-coder/phcoder' Serbinenko:
>> On 13.06.2013 03:41, George Chriss wrote:
>>> On Wed, Jun 12, 2013 at 7:16 PM, Vladimir 'φ-coder/phcoder' Serbinenko wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Hello, all. In order to build X201 rom, you need management engine
>>>> firmware. For chromebook the appropriate blobs are in 3rdparty repo, I
>>>> suppose supplied by Intel. The only place where I could get ME firmware
>>>> for X201 is by dumping chip with external programmer. It's probably not
>>>> appropriate for coreboot to distribute those blobs (I'm unsure on their
>>>> license) and given that it writes a log to its section which may contain
>>>> private data, I don't want to distribute it either. Yet without this
>>>> blob the build legitimately fails. Any suggestions on handling this?
>>>
>>> Are the coreboot dependencies function calls or something
>>> hardware-specific?
>> Coreboot send ME a message to tell it what to use for UMA.
>> ACPI (at least CPU temperature) also goes through ME even if you read it
>> from EC.
>>>  Is it possible to build a 'dummy' management engine
>>> that still boots the X201, even with reduced functionality?
>> It will reboot or hard lock after 30 minutes
>>> (Is ME binary code executed at any point using coreboot?)
>>
>> No, it's executed on coprocessor, it's in the same flash but coreboot
>> doesn't have to do anything to load it.
> 
> Isn’t a dummy ME viable to get a successful build though? Surely the
> user should be warned, when such dummy files are used. (Like, you need
> to extract the real files. Look at the coreboot Wiki how to do so.)
> 
Build failure is the best way to indicate that resulting image wouldn't
work and/or is dangerous. I feel like build failure without those files
would be intended.
Thing is that we still want Jenkins to be able to build for its build
tests. Can perhaps Jenkins disable an option "Add ME firmware" which
would be on by default? Or have some kind of define BUILD_TEST.
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> Paul
> 


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