Uwe Hermann | A slightly paranoid Debian developer

The coreboot project (previously known as LinuxBIOS) is taking part in the Google Summer of Code™ 2008 program. This year, the project has been assigned two slots/students who will work on the following projects:

• All Virtual All The Time (AVATT):

  This project aims to integrate into the coreboot BIOS a payload consisting of a minimalist KVM-aware Linux kernel along with an initrd image that contains the tools needed for creating and starting guest virtual machines installed on top of it. The resulting system could host any x86(or x86-64) OS that can run over KVM (almost any major OS does), and there is a great challenge to make it as small as possible, so that it can fit in a 2MB flash image.

• SCSI booting in coreboot:

  Currently coreboot can not boot from an arbitrary SCSI controller. There are two solutions for the problem: (1) Use Linux and Kexec. This requires to keep the SCSI driver in the flash chip. (2) Use x86emu/vm86/ADLO and the int13 method. This would allow to use the PCI option rom available on all modern SCSI controllers. So we obviously need a solution based on the latter. This could as well be implemented as a Linux program, as an intermediate payload, or as a shared library. At this point of time, I would like to implemente it as a daemon program. The program needs to catch the int13 interrupt vector that the SCSI option rom installs and make it available to arbitrary (firmware/payload) code trying to load something from disk.

This should make for an interesting summer with nice improvements for coreboot.