ron minnich wrote: > My goal was pretty simple: Kill the UEFI HOBs, and the FSP UPD, and > put something better in their place. coreboot tables could easily > replace HOBs, save that intel will never accept that;
Thanks, now I understand. > but I don't see coreboot tables replacing UPD. Why couldn't they? (Politics aside, for now.) > I like self describing data as it avoids that mess that we are in with > UPD today, where you can end up with problems if the compilers you use > for FSP and (e.g.) coreboot don't agree totally on how to lay out data > structures. Understand! Not even having a well-defined serialization is a disaster. CBOR is a solution to that but I think it has way too many primitives. > UPD are also a major pain for non-C firmware, such as oreboot. Again because of undefined alignment, or something else? > So I'd like a data format that is not defined by a compiler or > language. But maybe I'm the only person who wants that :-) I completely agree that well-defined serialization is neccessary for interoperability, it's pretty amazing that Intel overlooked that. I wonder what else.. You asked about other serializations, the one I was last pleasantly surprised by was the Kafka protocol, which isn't as arduous as one might think based on the name. :) Like coreboot tables it does not describe structure, only values, so reader and writer must agree on what they transfer out-of-band based on a shared definition, but certainly not based on any compiler properties. It is however a network and disk serialization - far simpler than CBOR but maybe still unneccessarily complex or at least somewhat unfitting for firmware. It mostly has signed values and later versions (there's a version in a header) add varints to save bytes, because the protocol is made for very high message volume - so not really applicable to firmware. How about using cbtable primitives to express UPD and calling it something new? //Peter _______________________________________________ coreboot mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected]
