UEFI from Linux enthusiast perspective

Another interesting topic with which I am dealing with recently is the UEFI. As we read on wikipedia: "The Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) is a specification that defines a software interface between an operating system and platform firmware.". The purpose of this specification is to create something what in the future fully replace the BIOS.


Of course, as always in such a situation, I wonder what OpenSource and Linux gurus have to say. A brief googling and I found this. On the one hand are noticeable advantages: better design, formalized structure of the code, the C programming language, but you can feel that community fears and feared that the "standard" will be used in an inappropriate manner. Therefore, I regularly read LWN RSS feeds, and it seems that on the horizon you can see already the first ideas on how to use UEFI to limit freedom. You can read about it in this article: "SFLC: Microsoft confirms UEFI fears, locks down ARM devices".


Personally, I really do not like it, because I believe that everyone who buys the equipment has the right to exploit its capabilities in such a manner it deems appropriate.


Of course, as usual, I change the subject. I wanted to write about the project TianoCore, which is an open source implementation of UEFI implemented by Intel. When you do not have the strength nor the resources to fight the system, use the system to gather strength and resources, and then start fighting. So in the next post I will try to describe my first experience with EDKII in emulated environment of QEMU.

My view for silver perspective

In the morning when reading RSS feeds (I should think about placing its list somewhere on the blog) from several sources the information came to me that silver is highly underrated recent times. I try to carefully analyze such information, despite the fact that I use more of niche sources of information and what is in them is served rather carefully selected. Although I looked at this subject a little closer.


One of the factors that should be taken into account is the silver to gold ratio. It is said that historically it was 16, or 16 ounces of silver buys one ounce of gold. In view of the massive derivatives trading, selling certificates based on complex rules (that basically said "do not try to take this physical"), the silver market manipulation and the like rip accounting, the ratio is 3-4 times higher. After reading information about undervalued silver I looked at my favorite website provides charts stockcharts.com and yesterday I checked, this ratio it was 56 and today fallen slightly due to movements in silver. Six months ago this ratio was below 40. What I learn until now silver reacts slower than gold and gold is taking action now. When I check stockcharts before New Year I found out that price per kilogram of gold was about 38 000 euro. Right now it is 41 100 and seems still rise. Silver seemed to wondering all the moves, and this morning took off. At the same time when I check gold silver became the shockingly low price of 663 euros per kilo. The new year saw a jump to level 730 and it looks like that this morning go after gold and now cost 760.


We'll see how strong it will move. From a technical point of view, per half year MACD is narrow, and the RSI is equal to 54 and is far from the area to buy. Moving averages of 50 and 200 are to each other in nearly parallel position and technically in the next few months should not be anything happening. The three-year term MACD lines have not yet crossed, RSI is less than 50 recent declines lasted too short to harm long distance running averages of 50 and 200 on a 3-year chart.

Precisely because there is little evidence for any event you may receive move. Of course, seriously people know that long-term perspective and fundamental considerations leave no doubt that the bull will have long reigned in the areas of commodity. While speculation is paper, and this can lead astray careless player.

Ideas for development

All the time come to my mind new ideas about what could be added to the blog and what information to post. I'm interested in so many things that many of the ideas are killed before reaching the plane of the keyboard and has no chance to be introduced even as a draft to the blog. It seems that for myself I should store ideas for development in order to easily return to them when ripe.

1. I want occasionally write something about the commodity markets, however, I'm interested in it very briefly, because only about a year it seems to me that sometimes I have something to say.
2. I begin learning about the UEFI environment and, therefore, that I am an advocate of freedom in the broad sense of the word, I would like to refer to this solution. I also want to understand the advantages and disadvantages of this solution in the context of freedom and relate them to other solutions such as coreboot.
3. I would also like to implement a section that could be titled "what I'm interested now ?", "what I read now?" and "what was last seen?"

I would like to set a specific time for blogging during the week, what with certainty contribute to faster realization of these ideas.

Syntax highlighter and code formatter for Blogger

Another time-waster was a decent code formatter and syntax highlighter. I google out following solution, it is based on SyntaxHighlighter 3 It has interesting options:

1. You can select the language for which a syntax-colored
2. Turn on/off line numbering
3. Themes - this one is pretty nice for my blog
4. Customizable tabs size
5. The option to disable toolbar

My dream would be to create a theme that would look similar to vim syntax highlighing.

flashrom and Shuttle AV18E2

During Christmas break I found an old unused motherboard in my home, right away I thought that it maybe useful as learning environment for coreboot. First you need to do with this kind of board is to check if it is possible to flash its BIOS with user space tool called flashrom list of supported hardware can be found here.


All you need to do is go through this HOWTO. Be aware that these operations can cause you will not be able to run your motherboard if something goes wrong. Therefore, I suggest protect yourself by supplying checked programmer or other memory chip for your board containing a working BIOS.


For my Shuttle board I checked if the Winbond W49F002U chip on it is supported by flashrom. Fortunately it was. After that I read my BIOS by:

flashrom -Vr bios_bckp.bin

And write it by:

flashrom -Vw bios_bckp.bin

At the end I've got VERIFIED message but when I look carefully inside the log there was something like this:

Erasing and writing flash chip... Trying erase function 0... 0x000000-0x01ffff:S,
 0x020000-0x037fff:S, 0x038000-0x039fff:S, 0x03a000-0x03bfff:S, 0x03c000-0x03ffff:S
Erase/write done.
Verifying flash... VERIFIED.

This means that these addresses have not been overwritten but skipped, becuse the fact that the data which were to be overridden were identical with what we wanted to write. So if we found such output to properly verify flashrom we need to clear our memory and write it again with BIOS backup. Correct output should look like this:

Erasing and writing flash chip... Trying erase function 0... 0x000000-0x01ffff:W,
0x020000-0x037fff:W, 0x038000-0x039fff:W, 0x03a000-0x03bfff:W, 0x03c000-0x03ffff:W
Erase/write done.
Verifying flash... VERIFIED. 

Next post I will try to familiarize you with the process of debugging coreboot using QEMU.

How to begin with coreboot

About a month ago I started my adventure with coreboot. As coreboot home page says "coreboot is a Free Software project aimed at replacing the proprietary BIOS (firmware) found in most computers". Although I read the majority of materials from mentioned page I still suffered from a lack of basic information that would help me to arrange everything in my head. Therefore, I decided to write a series of posts described my actions associated with this interesting project.


At the beginning I would recommend some interesting sources of information on coreboot:

• http://www.coreboot.org/QEMU - If you're impatient and want to start as soon as possible
• Coreboot videos - One of the easiest ways to obtain general information about the project
• Start to understand - I found this page by accident while googling materials, thanks to its author I understood basics and found out what's next
• Documentation - Many different types of documents, a large proportion of them are not applying to the latest version of coreboot v4, however, still has a educational value.

After reviewing the above materials, you should understand the basics of coreboot. In the next post I will describe flashrom application and my experience with one of the old motherboard.

Blogger favicon in Chrome and FF

I didn't imagine that placing the code for favicon can be so time consuming. Here are some tpis and tricks that can be useful to others.
1. First find or create favicon (google or favicon.cc)
2. Make sure that you have not set any favicon (Design-> Page Elelments-> Favicon)
3. Add this code below </head> tag

<link href='http://bsaves.com/HowHero/Blogger%20Templates/moonspot/images/favicon.ico' rel='shortcut icon' type='image/vnd.microsoft.icon' />
<link href='http://bsaves.com/HowHero/Blogger%20Templates/moonspot/images/favicon.ico' rel='icon'/>

This tip comes from here. It doesn't work on IE but this did not bother me.

If you want put the favicon in the network to imageshack.us to receive a direct link from them you must register. For those who do not want to do that I propose to use available in Chrome the "inspect element" feature with its help you can easily read the entire value of the field "Direct Link" on imageshack.

Blogspot beginning

1. Blog should be correctly displayed under lynx
2. I'm not a sophisticated graphic designer, so I can not afford a sensational appearance (so far).

Test

01234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789 This first test for blogger.vim plugin. THis will be used as sandbox, it looks like blogger vim works fine, need to check features that mostly use.
Continue testing: this is link
- this is dash
- 2nd dash

this is bash code

plain text

1. 1st
   1. under 1.st
   2. 2nd under 2st
2. 2.nd
   

Blog look and feel idea

Because I'm a fan of Linux climate of terminals and this kind of stuff. I will try to tweak blogspot tamplete (fonts, background etc.) to terminal (right know I don't know which one) style. 

Blogspot begin: todo list

1. Learn Blogspot
2. Consider Google Analytics
3. Find nice backgrounds (probably should be similar to my favourite graphics)
4. Tune in fonts, blog layout, labels, tags, widgets etc.
5. Continue story

Why I decided to write a blog ?

Of course there are plenty of reasons. This idea haunted me for many months but finally insomnia pushed me to start.

First post

This is first post to see how blog looks like.