Integration of UEFI Variables into sortbootorder to Maintain Consistency Across Firmware Versions

[pietrushnic]

The CBFS API has undergone significant changes that have necessitated updates to the sortbootorder codebase. Notably, certain boot options traditionally managed within sortbootorder have been migrated to UEFI Variables, impacting functionality when using both edk2 and SeaBIOS. The challenge is to update sortbootorder to parse these UEFI Variables to ensure a consistent configuration interface across different BIOS implementations.

Additional concerns have arisen during the integration process:

• Assess whether sortbootorder can support these changes, particularly the parsing of UEFI Variables, which may not be supported by libpayload currently.
• Relevant changes from coreboot v0.9.0 need to be considered for integration and possibly rebasing to the current version 24.05:
• sorbootorder should leverage following implementation from v0.9.0
  • Core Performance Boost option in UEFI Setup Menu
  • PCI Express Power Management option in UEFI Setup Menu
  • Configurable Boot Order - this sounds like a big thing to completely change the method of handling the boot order
• sortbootorder should port handling the following options to UEFI Variables
  • Network/PXE boot - it already may be implemented
  • USB boot
  • Serial console - it already may be implemented
  • Redirect console output to COM2
  • UART C - Toggle UART C / GPIO
  • UART D - Toggle UART D / GPIO
  • Force mPCIe2 slot CLK (GPP3 PCIe)
  • EHCI0 controller
  • IOMMU
  • Enable BIOS write protect

[miczyg1]

I'm not sure if this is the right approach to use UEFI variables in the sortbootorder+SeaBIOS flavor. While accessing UEFI variables isn't a problem in coreboot, it will be in SeaBIOS. One would have to implement the UFI variables access in SeaBIOS to actually have the feature parity...

[pietrushnic]

@miczyg1 Yes, that's why I asked @krystian-hebel to review this issue since it was created based on his suggestions on the matrix. Or maybe I misunderstood something. We can treat this as a long-term proposal, which may be implemented in the long run. Nevertheless, the Dasharo Team should be aware of this idea in case synergy pops up later.