HFI BIOS 1.3 released

HFI BIOS version 1.3 has been released.

Video demonstration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBVH-6bD9yI

Main features

  • SpaceMiT K3 Pico ITX support. The board cold-starts from NOR and boots through to a Linux desktop: the panel is driven by a VideoBIOS module, UFS storage is enumerated over SCSI, and USB host, PCIe and the on-board Ethernet all come up in firmware.
  • The network is handed over live. The firmware takes the interface all the way to a negotiated link and leaves it running, so the operating system inherits a working interface rather than a chip to initialize from cold — and is told the address and link state through the device tree it was already reading.
  • The board fan is started during power-on, and its speed is shown on the PC Health Status page. A machine left sitting at a firmware prompt is cooled rather than merely measured.
  • A complete device tree is handed to the operating system, with the firmware's own findings written into it.
  • A borrowed processor is given back. Where the character generator is a core the firmware borrowed rather than an engine on a card, that core is retired at ExitBootServices, so the OS gains a whole processor it would not otherwise have had.
  • The Flash Utility writes either board, from a one- or two-stage firmware update package, with the board identity checked before anything is erased.
  • POST reports what it found, not merely that a step ran: storage scans name the drives and their size, and a machine built from more than one kind of core is itemized rather than averaged.
  • Both manuals ship with the firmware — a User Manual and a Technical Reference, as PDFs in the repository.

Binary build

The binary build can be obtained from: https://github.com/qsoe-dev/hfi-bios

The U-Boot ITB can be extracted from the .hfifw package with: 

dumpimage -T flat_dt -p 0 -o u-boot.itb HFI-SpaceMiT-K3-PicoITX-SysBIOS-1.3.hfifw

SHA-256 of the extracted ITB: 

3f8f5fe81cdef530e953f6b95db48b3ed2c777cb30d843aab4e064a7f5a28f55

SHA-256 of the package itself (its size is 887510 bytes): 

afffd1290078fee79c2610219859697238245e76513932ed7dc961306d208e2d

Installing it

The resulting ITB can be installed on the mtd6 partition of your SpaceMiT K3 Pico ITX system. It is presumed you know what you are doing. The vendor's FSBL and OpenSBI below it stay exactly as the factory wrote them; only mtd6 is ours. Don't forget to install GRUB in Bianbu Linux.

Source

The source repository is at: https://gitlab.com/bios-riscv

Make sure both the Video BIOS and the main HFI BIOS repositories are cloned: their names are k3-videobios and hfi-bios respectively.

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