The coreboot project posted their regular project status update. In the last two week period, there have been: 105 commits by 25 authors, adding 13K and removing 3K lines of code. There were updates for multiple boards and chipsets, including Intel Galileo board and Quark chip, Intel Sandy Bridge/Ivy Bridge, Intel Skylake, Intel Bay Trail, Intel Apollo Lake, ARM ARM7 QEMU board, QEMU POWER8, and RISC-V. There were also updates to ARM Trusted Firmware and Verified Boot. Excerpting the announcement:
Payloads got some attention during this period, adding a way to include additional modules into the GRUB2 build. An option was added to build and include coreinfo as a ‘secondary’ payload, allowing it to be run from another payload. We also added U-Boot as a coreboot payload. This is currently still just in development, and needs additional work before it will act as a generic payload for all platforms.
We added LZ4 compression to the build with runtime decompression for cbfs. LZ4’s speed should be roughly the same as LZMA, trading a smaller compressed size for slightly slower decompressoin. LZ4’s main advantage is that it requires much less memory to do the decompression, allowing for compression of stages that couldn’t previously be compressed.
The suite of board-status scripts got several updates, fixing timestamp handling for the sanitized path names, handling when the script is run as super-user in a better way, and adding a script that will set up a Ubuntu Live-image to allow users to more easily run the board-status script.
In the build tools and utilities, we had some fixes for the toolchain builder, updating the GDB builds for x86_64 and MIPS. A couple of scripts were also added. One utility downloads and extracts binary blobs from Chrome OS recovery images, and the other new script allow easier testing of POST cards.
It is always hard to excerpt coreboot blog posts, they have a lot of good data which I’ve omitted. Full post:
Firmware Security 