[coreboot] software hardening research project - request for advices to start

[Laurent Lesage]

Hello all,

After having searched around me for some answers about BIOS and PC board 
"hacking", I want to ask directly to the "core" developers.

In short, I would like to run a test software without OS (say, like 
"memtest") on a standard mainboard. This software will have to access a 
PCIe board, and may be some components of the mainboard. So we expect 
the software will not exceed a few hundred kilobytes. During this 
experiment, we want that a reset of the CPU does not lead to a reboot, 
but just restart our software immediately (only a cold start would redo 
all the usual "POST"), skipping all the usual hardware setups. 
"immediately" means in one ms or so (the less, the best). More details 
about what I'm working on at the end of this post. To achieve this on 
standard mainboards, being able to modify the BIOS seems the only way.

My questions /request for comments and advices :
1.Is it feasible to modifiy the BIOS for such a reset (without POST and 
very quickly).
2.Is it possible to put our software on the BIOS chip, so that we do not 
need to access hard disk, and so that the code is protected (Read only) 
during the runs.
3. is it possible to flash the BIOS without locking the board, i.e., is 
it always possible to recover a working bios if flashing process failed, 
or experimental BIOS is not working as expected. In that sense, are 
there boards to avoid?
4.knowing we will have to access a PCIex8/16 extension board, and 
knowing the points 1, 2 and 3, which board would you advice to use? For 
example, I saw this one ( 
http://www.coreboot.org/ASUS_F2A85-M#Hardware_info ) for which PCIe 
support seems OK. Of course, the board must be easy to buy, so older 
ones are not a good choice if they are sold out.

I also saw that some boards offers bigger space to flash BIOS. Again, 
this would be a good criterion for our needs, if it is possible to flash 
our software in it using the remaining space.
What I wish is to start with a mainboard that has more than 90% of 
probability to meet our needs.

Some more details about the project.
I'm research engineer in UCLouvain (Belgium). Our topic is "software 
hardening for mission critical embedded software". Quickly said, we want 
to test our approach with COTS hardware (usually, testing is done on 
FPGA systems, or specific hardened  hardware systems). So, we want to 
use a PC board to run a very specific software on it (that could be the 
"payload" coreboot can start). We intend to make this in two stages :
-first tests on a "naked" machine i.e. without OS. Our software is the 
payload. That is the subject of this post.
-later, run a software hardened version of Minix (I saw minix is not yet 
usable as such but if we come to this end, we will have some knowledge 
to go this way).
The CPU of our "naked machine" will at the end be irradiated to inject 
error in it, and see if it detects errors and stays working despite 
transient faults.

Regards

Laurent

board with special memory and FPGA on it