From d9a5779a0e2dbe52ca22593da78c32a8b2d7d29e Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Patrick Georgi Date: Fri, 8 Mar 2019 09:25:29 +0100 Subject: [PATCH] Docs/project_ideas: Add a "parse SerialICE traces" project idea Change-Id: I696811ff93948358f03ff617d294ecc40bd4c746 Signed-off-by: Patrick Georgi Reviewed-on: https://review.coreboot.org/c/coreboot/+/31820 Tested-by: build bot (Jenkins) Reviewed-by: Angel Pons --- Documentation/contributing/project_ideas.md | 22 +++++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 22 insertions(+) diff --git a/Documentation/contributing/project_ideas.md b/Documentation/contributing/project_ideas.md index 97499a8c62..21a756d99a 100644 --- a/Documentation/contributing/project_ideas.md +++ b/Documentation/contributing/project_ideas.md @@ -179,3 +179,25 @@ disassembler and decompiler that is extensible through plugins. Make it useful for firmware related work: Automatically parse formats (eg. by integrating UEFITool, cbfstool, decompressors), automatically identify 16/32/64bit code on x86/amd64, etc. + +## Learn hardware behavior from I/O and memory access logs +[SerialICE](https://www.serialice.com) is a tool to trace the behavior of +executable code like firmware images. One result of that is a long log file +containing the accesses to hardware resources. + +It would be useful to have a tool that assists a developer-analyst in deriving +knowledge about hardware from such logs. This likely can't be entirely +automatic, but a tool that finds patterns and can propagate them across the +log (incrementially raising the log from plain I/O accesses to a high-level +description of driver behavior) would be of great use. + +This is a research-heavy project. + +### Requirements +* Driver knowledge: Somebody working on this should be familiar with + how hardware works (eg. MMIO based register access, index/data port + accesses) and how to read data sheets. +* Machine Learning: ML techniques may be useful to find structure in traces. + +### Mentors +* Ron Minnich