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Before you follow this guide, it is advisable that you have the ability to flash externally, just in case something goes wrong.

This guide assumes that you use the GRUB bootloader as your default payload. In this configuration, GRUB is flashed alongside coreboot and runs on bare metal as a native coreboot payload and does not use BIOS or UEFI services (but it can load and execute SeaBIOS, in addition to any other coreboot payload, by chainloading it).

In most circumstances, this guide will not benefit you. Canoeboot’s default GRUB configuration file contains scripting logic within it that intelligently searches for GRUB partitions installed onto a partition on your SSD, HDD or USB drive installed on your computer. If such a file is found, Canoeboot’s default GRUB configuration is configured to switch automatically to that configuration. While not perfect, the logic does work with most configurations.

Therefore, you should only follow this guide if the automation (described above) does not work. It goes without saying that modifying the default GRUB configuration is risky, because a misconfiguration could create what’s called a soft brick where your machine is effectively useless and, in that scenario, may or may not require external flashing equipment for restoring the machine to a known state.

Canoeboot does not currently distribute utilities pre-compiled. It only provides ROM images pre-compiled, where feasible. Therefore, you have to build the utilities from source.

As for the ROM, there are mainly three methods for obtaining a Canoeboot ROM image:

1. Dump the contents of the the main boot flash on your system, which already has Canoeboot installed (with GRUB as the default payload). Extract the GRUB configuration from that ROM image.
2. Extract it from a Canoeboot ROM image supplied by the Canoeboot project, on the Canoeboot website or mirrors of the Canoeboot website.
3. Build the ROM yourself, using the Canoeboot build system. Instructions for how to do this are covered in the following article: How to build Canoeboot from source

In either case, you will use the cbfstool supplied in the Canoeboot build system. This can be found under coreboot/*/util/cbfstool/ as source code, where * can be any coreboot source code directory for a given mainboard. The directory named default should suffice.

Install the build dependencies. For Ubuntu 20.04 and similar, you can run the following command in the Canoeboot build system, from the root directory of the Canoeboot Git repository.

./build dependencies ubuntu2004

Then, download coreboot:

./update trees -f coreboot

Finally, compile the cbutils module:

./build grub

Among other things, this will produce a cbfstool executable under any of the subdirectories in src/coreboot/ under `util/cbfstool/cbfstool

For example: src/coreboot/default/util/cbfstool/cbfstool

The cbfstool utility is what you shall use. It is used to manipulate CBFS (coreboot file system) which is a file system contained within the coreboot ROM image; as a coreboot distribution, Canoeboot inherits this technology.

You will also want to build flashrom which Canoeboot recommends for reading from and/or writing to the boot flash. In the Canoeboot build system, you can build it by running this command:

./update trees -b flashrom

An executable will be available at src/flashrom/flashrom after you have done this.

If you wish to modify your existing Canoeboot ROM, which was installed on your computer, you can use flashrom to acquire it.

Simply run the following, after using Canoeboot’s build system to compile flashrom:

sudo ./src/flashrom/flashrom -p internal -r dump.bin

If flashrom complains about multiple flash chip definitions, do what it says to rectify your command and run it again.

You may want to use the following, instead of -p internal: -p internal:laptop=force_I_want_a_brick,boardmismatch=force

Do not let the word brick fools you. This merely disables the safety checks in flashrom, which is sometimes necessary depending on what ROM was already flashed, versus the new ROM image.

The internal option assumes that internal read/write is possible; this is when you read from and/or write to the boot flash from an operating systems (usually GNU+Linux) that is running on the target system.

In other cases, you may need to connect an SPI programmer externally (with the machine powered down) and read the contents of the boot flash.

Learn how to externally reprogram these chips

Releases or or after Canoeboot 20231026 contain grub.cfg inside GRUB memdisk, inaccessible directly from CBFS, but the memdisk is inside grub.elf which gets put inside CBFS.

An override is possible, on new Canoeboot revisions. If grub.cfg is present in CBFS, Canoeboot’s GRUB will use that and not the memdisk one; it will not auto-switch to grubtest.cfg, but the test config will be available in the menu to switch to, if present. This contrasts older behaviour in Libreboot 20230625.

You can find grub.cfg under lbmk (for this purpose, it’s best to use the lbmk one, not the release one - unless you’re using a release image). Find it at path (in current lbmk): config/grub/config/grub.cfg.

So, you can add grubtest.cfg as normal, test that, and then add grub.cfg once you’re happy, and it will override the default.

In Libreboot 20230625 and older, GRUB memdisk always loaded the config from CBFS, which you would have to replace; this meant it was possible to brick your GRUB installation if you accidentally flashed without grub.cfg. In Canoeboot 20231026 and higher, such error is impossible; this behaviour is also present in Libreboot 20231021, upon which Canoeboot 20231026 is based.

This new behaviour is therefore much safer, under user error. However, it’s still possible to flash a bad grub.cfg by misconfiguring it, which is why you should add grubtest.cfg first; when present, it will be available in the default menu, for testing, but the GRUB memdisk config will always be used first if no grub.cfg (as opposed to grubtest.cfg) exists in CBFS.

You can find the default config under config/grub/config/grub.cfg in the Canoeboot build system,

Remove the old grub.cfg (substitute with grubtest.cfg as desired):

cbfstool dump.bin remove -n grub.cfg

Add your modified grub.cfg (substitute with grubtest.cfg as desired):

cbfstool dump.bin add -f grub.cfg -n grub.cfg -t raw

Your modified dump.bin or other modified Canoeboot ROM can then be re-flashed using:

sudo ./flashrom -p internal -w dump.bin

If a -c option is required, use it and specify a flash chip name. This is only useful when flashrom complains about multiple flash chips being detected.

If flashrom complains about wrong chip/board, make sure that your ROM is for the correct system. If you’re sure, you can disable the safety checks by running this instead:

sudo ./flashrom -p internal:laptop=force_I_want_a_brick,boardmismatch=force -w dump.bin

If you need to use external flashing equipment, see the link above to the Raspberry Pi page.

Markdown file for this page: https://canoeboot.org/docs/gnulinux/grub_cbfs.md

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