Collaborative Firmware Payload Handoff Design

The two prominent x86 firmware solutions, EDK2 & coreboot have divergent designs on how information is passed between programs. The coreboot project uses coreboot/LinuxBios (the structure dates for early 2000) tables to inform the payload. EDK2 generally uses HOBs to pass information between modules. Both have their limitations: e.g. coreboot tables need to be 4 byte aligned which makes decoding on 64bit systems problematic. HOBs tend to be versioned, which makes agreeing on the struct format a hurdle and have a 64K size limitation. In 2007 Linux introduced the flattened devicetree (FDT), to do exactly that: inform the OS about the hardware. It is a very good match for the payload handoff that we want to achieve in both EDK2 and coreboot. FDT is an industry standard that is very widely deployed on all sorts of hardware and software projects, with easy to use code. Due to the widespread use of FDT and existing implementations in both EDK2 and coreboot (and of course Linux) to support the format, it is expected to be a simple yet effective solution of doing a payload handoff. In line with that, CBOR, a newly emerged communication protocol is gaining momentum in deployments from firmware to OS level usages.
This document will discuss how to implement a handoff between coreboot and EDK2 using either CBOR or FDT as a handoff structure, and compare both implementations.