QEMU SBSA emulator

This page describes how to build and run coreboot for QEMU’s sbsa-ref machine. The qemu-sbsa coreboot image acts as BL-3.3 for Arm Trusted Firmware (TF-A) and mainly takes care of setting up SMBIOS and ACPI tables, hence, in order to boot, you also need to supply a TF-A image.

Building TF-A

You can build TF-A from source by fetching

https://github.com/ARM-software/arm-trusted-firmware

and building the qemu-sbsa platform

PLAT=qemu_sbsa

Upon entry, coreboot expects a FDT pointer in x0, so make sure to compile TF-A with

ARM_LINUX_KERNEL_AS_BL33=1

This will force TF-A to pass a pointer to the FDT in x0.

Building coreboot

Simply select the qemu-sbsa board and, optionally, configure a payload. We recommend the leanefi payload. leanefi will setup a minimal set of UEFI services, just enough to boot into a linux kernel.

Running coreboot in QEMU

Once you have obtained TF-A and coreboot images, launch qemu via

qemu-system-aarch64 -nographic -m 1024 -M sbsa-ref -pflash <path/to/TFA.fd> \
                                                   -pflash <path/to/coreboot.rom>

LBBR bootflow

arm and 9elements worked together in order to create a LBBR compliant bootflow consisting of TF-A, coreboot, leanefi and LinuxBoot. A proof of concept can be found here https://gitlab.arm.com/systemready/firmware-build/linuxboot/lbbr-coreboot-poc