External Resources

This is a list of resources that could be useful to coreboot developers. These are not endorsed or officially recommended by the coreboot project, but simply listed here in the hopes that someone will find something useful.

Please add any helpful or informational links and sections as you see fit.

Articles

• External Interrupts in the x86 system.

  • Part 1: Interrupt controller evolution

  • Part 2: Linux kernel boot options

  • Part 3: Interrupt routing setup in a chipset

• System address map initialization in x86/x64 architecture.

  • Part 1: PCI-based systems

  • Part 2: PCI express-based systems

  • PCIe elastic buffer

• Boot Guard and PSB have user-hostile defaults

General Information

• OS Dev

• Interface BUS

OpenSecurityTraining2

OpenSecurityTraining2 is dedicated to sharing training material for any topic related to computer security, including coreboot.

There are various ways to learn firmware, some are more efficient than others, depending on the people. Before going straight to practice and experimenting with hardware, it can be beneficial to learn the basics of computing. OST2 focuses on conveying computer architecture and security information in the form of structured instructor-led classes, available to everyone for free.

All material is licensed CC BY-SA 4.0, allowing anyone to use the material however they see fit, so long as they share modified works back to the community.

Below is a list of currently available courses that can help understand the inner workings of coreboot and other firmware-related topics:

• coreboot design principles and boot process

• x86-64 Assembly

• x86-64 OS Internals

• x86-64 Intel Firmware Attack & Defense

There are additional security courses at the site as well (such as how to avoid writing exploitable code in C/C++.)

Firmware Specifications & Information

• System Management BIOS - SMBIOS

• Desktop and Mobile Architecture for System Hardware - DASH

• PNP BIOS

ACPI

• ACPI Specs

• ACPI in Linux

• ACPI 5 Linux

• ACPI 6 Linux

Security

• Intel Boot Guard

Hardware information

• WikiChip

• Sandpile

• CPU-World

• CPU-Upgrade

Hardware Specifications & Standards

• Bluetooth - Bluetooth SIG

• eMMC - JEDEC - (LOGIN REQUIRED)

• eSPI - Intel

• I2c Spec, Appnote - NXP

• I2S - NXP

• I3C - MIPI Alliance (LOGIN REQUIRED)

• Memory - JEDEC - (LOGIN REQUIRED)

• NVMe - NVMe Specifications

• LPC - Intel

• PCI / PCIe / M.2 - PCI-SIG - (LOGIN REQUIRED)

• Power Delivery - USB Implementers Forum

• SATA - SATA-IO (LOGIN REQUIRED)

• SMBus - System Management Interface Forum

• Smart Battery - Smart Battery System Implementers Forum

• USB - USB Implementers Forum

• WI-FI - Wi-Fi Alliance

Chip Vendor Documentation

• AMD

  • Developer Guides, Manuals & ISA Documents

  • AMD Tech Docs - Official Documentation Page

• ARM

  • Tools and Software - Specifications

• Intel

  • Developer Zone

  • Resource & Documentation Center

  • Architecture Software Developer Manuals

  • Intel specific ACPI

  • coreboot on Eagle Stream

• Rockchip

  • Open Source Wiki

Software

• Fiedka - A graphical Firmware Editor

• IOTools - Command line tools to access hardware registers

• UEFITool - Editor for UEFI PI compliant firmware images

• CHIPSEC - Framework for analyzing platform level security & configuration

• SPDEditor - GUI to edit DDR3 SPD files

• DDR4XMPEditor - Editor for DDR4 SPD and XMP

• overclockSPD - Fast and easy way to read and write data to RAM SPDs.

• VBiosFinder - This tool attempts to extract a VBIOS from a BIOS update.

Infrastructure software

• Kconfig

• GNU Make