Attention is currently required from: Angel Pons, Benjamin Doron, Christian Walter, Lean Sheng Tan, Leon Groß, Patrick Rudolph.
Nico Huber has posted comments on this change. ( https://review.coreboot.org/c/coreboot/+/77905?usp=email )
Change subject: mb/emulation: Add SIMICS QSP support ......................................................................
Patch Set 13:
(1 comment)
Patchset:
PS4:
I'm not sure if I follow. You expect current users of Simics to adopt this? Currently, with QEMU it's as simple as running `make qemu`. Are there plans to make Simics as easy to use? if not, wouldn't it be better to teach people about QEMU?
I guess we can start from here :)
i mean it is no harm to add more support to the platform for coreboot i guess?
Every addition also adds at least some maintenance overhead. I've often seen redundant additions to be abandoned and bit rot.
This sounds pretty discouraging to be honest. If every time someone spend some time to implement a nice additional feature or implement new board support (in this case it actually takes 2 months for the engineer to work on this), and we shoot it down with the reason "oh please dont do it it just add more maintainance", that is not very welcoming to the new coreboot leaner who try to work on something isn't it? 😊
That's why we usually ask if something is a good idea for upstream in advance. It only takes about 1 hour to write an email, explaining what Simics QSP is and how to use it and how it would look like with coreboot. That can easily safe 2 months of potentially unnecessary work. I'm not saying it's been done in vain. But use cases need to be explained when requesting to maintain things upstream. This is a very important part of review and IMO should come first.
Even if there is no definite use case and this is just part of some strategy, that can be explained and discussed, too ofc. What harm does it do to explain things?
And also we have maintainer list for this purpose - so I personally dont see it is a big issue here.
The maintainers list is mostly listing people who *might* reply to requests. What we need is people who proactively maintain things. Anyway, digressing, this has nothing to do with the patch.
It is a nice addition as well. As it does have specific use cases (although quite limited): as Intel or silicon vendors usually use Simics for the RTL simulation before the actual silicon is available, actively used by the internal engineers for that.
Do they use QSP?
I guess so, as you can see Intel engineers actively update it in edk2 tree. So my work is that i am also in discussion with the Simics guy to also include coreboot binary as default binary (together with current UEFI edk2 binary), and that could also help to promote coreboot to more people 😊
This sounds really nice. Why not start with that? If the binary is accepted, let's maintain it upstream?