Project Ideas

This section collects ideas to improve coreboot and related projects and should serve as a pool of ideas for people who want to enter the field of firmware development but need some guidance what to work on.

These tasks can be adopted as part of programs like Google Summer of Code or by motivated individuals outside such programs.

Each entry should outline what would be done, the benefit it brings to the project, the pre-requisites, both in knowledge and parts. They should also list people interested in supporting people who want to work on them - since we started building this list for Google Summer of Code, we'll adopt its term for those people and call them mentors.

Provide toolchain binaries

Our crossgcc subproject provides a uniform compiler environment for working on coreboot and related projects. Sadly, building it takes hours, which is a bad experience when trying to build coreboot the first time.

Provide packages/installers of our compiler toolchain for Linux distros, Windows, Mac OS. For Windows, this should also include the environment (shell, make, ...).

Requirements

  • coreboot knowledge: Should know how to build coreboot images and where the compiler comes into play in our build system.
  • other knowledge: Should know how packages or installers for their target OS work. Knowledge of the GCC build system is a big plus
  • hardware requirements: Nothing special

Mentors

Support Power9/Power8 in coreboot

There are some basic PPC64 stubs in coreboot, and there's open hardware in TALOS2 and its family. While they already have fully open source firmware, coreboot support adds a unified story for minimal firmware across architectures.

Requirements

  • coreboot knowledge: Should be familiar with making chipset level changes to the code.
  • other knowledge: A general idea of the Power architecture, the more, the better
  • hardware requirements: QEMU Power bring-up exists, and even if it probably needs to be fixed up, that shouldn't be an exceedingly large task. For everything else, access to real Power8/9 hardware and recovery tools (e.g. for external flashing) is required.

Mentors

Support QEMU AArch64 or MIPS

Having QEMU support for the architectures coreboot can boot helps with some (limited) compatibility testing: While QEMU generally doesn't need much hardware init, any CPU state changes in the boot flow will likely be quite close to reality.

That could be used as a baseline to ensure that changes to architecture code doesn't entirely break these architectures

Requirements

  • coreboot knowledge: Should know the general boot flow in coreboot.
  • other knowledge: This will require knowing how the architecture typically boots, to adapt the coreboot payload interface to be appropriate and, for example, provide a device tree in the platform's typical format.
  • hardware requirements: since QEMU runs practically everywhere and needs no recovery mechanism, these are suitable projects when no special hardware is available.

Mentors