coreboot March 2017

coreboot@coreboot.org

79 participants
267 discussions

cbfstool and initrd.cpio.xz
by Trammell Hudson 17 Mar '17

17 Mar '17

I was having a problem with adding compressed initrd images to my Linux payload with cbfstool. What I noticed is that if I build my initrd.cpio file and compress/link it into the bzImage via the Linux kernel's .config file, the kernel starts up just fine and executes out of the initrd. Likewise, if I have the coreboot .config bundle the bzImage and an uncompressed initrd.cpio, then it also works, but produces an image much too large for a real system. However, trying to have cbfstool bundle initrd.cpio.xz would cause the kernel to panic. Digging through the Linux kernel build scripts, I found that linux/scripts/gen_initramfs_list.sh passes in some extra options to compress the initrd.cpio file before linking it in. These options are necessary for the kernel to be able to decompress the xz file: xz \ --check=crc32 \ --lzma2=dict=1MiB \ --extreme \ < "$<" \ > "$@" -- Trammell

1 0

Re: [coreboot] coreboot community meeting minutes for March 16th, 2017
by ron minnich 17 Mar '17

17 Mar '17

This one surprised me: "Get Clang going again - what do we need to do to get it going?" So, as of a few months ago, after long discussion, the decision as I understood it was to make us GNU11, not C11. I went back and reviewed the discussion, and that was how it seemed to come out. Disclaimer: I help lead a kernel project (Harvey) which builds a working kernel under 3 versions of clang and 3 versions of gcc. It's not easy but it's not rocket science to make it go. We've derived a lot of benefit from making that work; each compiler finds errors the others miss. Tannenbaum is a strong advocate for confirming to C11, and compiling under many compilers, not, as he calls it, "GCC version of C". I would be a lot happier were we decide to stop using GNU features in our codebase, but IIUC, we've made an explicit decision to continuing doing so. Given that, how does Clang fit in to our future? ron

1 0

Re: [coreboot] How come the community meeting is hosted by proprietary software?
by ron minnich 17 Mar '17

17 Mar '17

This discussion comes up every few years, and it quickly diverges into discussion of a long list of candidate systems. This current thread is no exception. FWIW, we've tried many of them. Unfortunately, the free software meeting systems have not worked out. For any system to work, there are a few properties it must have: 1. It can't depend on one person managing the server, or the connection, or the setup. I.e., it can't have a single point of failure. People have kindly offered to set up SIP servers, many times, and we even used them a few times, but the problem is that the people who set up the server must be available for each and every meeting, from t = 0 to infinity, or it doesn't work. We've been here before, and it's really frustrating to get to the meeting time and find out the one person who is needed to make it work is not reachable. It is really, really easy to be there once or twice to make the meeting. Being there, without fail, once a week is a lot harder than it seems at first. 2. The software has to work for every possible client, and I do mean all. People tend to fall into the "well it works on *my* laptop" trap very easily. This is particularly problematical with systems that start on Linux, since portability in the Linux world seems to mean "works on Ubuntu AND Arch". There are a lot of us who use non-free software all the time (this is being typed on a mac pro) because the free software doesn't work as well. So we need systems that work for ios, android, osx, linux laptops in all their many variations, ... and the common experience with all these alternative meeting systems is that they are just not good enough to span that space. Yes, they should work. And if they did, we would have been using them since 2006, when this issue first came up. Now you can argue with me that the system you are advocating works on all those platforms, but I won't believe it until I see it. We've had people advocate some platforms over the years, with the claim that they worked everywhere, only to find out the claim had not been tested -- it's very common to hear: "well they SAID it worked everywhere ... wow ... we didn't know it wouldn't work on your xxxxx". It's not enough to say "works everywhere." We have to see it work everywhere. 3. Related to (1), it goes without saying, but any meeting system has to be structured and implemented as a scalable, reliable system. It has to not fail easily. This means redundancy in networks, servers, everything. So setting up one SIP server on one network connection is not a viable idea. That's why people run many of these services in clouds: the providers of clouds are pretty good (not perfect!) at providing very reliable services. There's also an issue with the premise: that because coreboot is striving to create free and open software for a single field of use, every single coreboot community activity must use only free and open software. How far does that go? Do we reject people who use iphones to join a meeting? Do we not allow packets to flow via cisco routers? Do we not run meetings on systems with microcode blobs? Are you not allowed to run on a laptop which has binary blobs in the disk controller? What about the OS in Atheros or other WIFI part? What about laptop modems -- do we not allow you to join a meeting if you are on the laptop modem? Or are you just requiring that some very narrow slice of software at the the endpoints be free and open source, while everything between can be proprietary? What does it really mean to say "why don't we use something free and open source?" when we talk about meeting software? You need to define the terms, and specify where it's ok for software to be non-free and non-open-source. Because, inevitably, some of it will be in ways you can't control. thanks ron On Fri, Mar 17, 2017 at 8:49 AM Iru Cai <mytbk920423(a)gmail.com> wrote: Have you tried the Matrix protocol (https://matrix.org) that I mentioned? It supports WebRTC as well as talk with text and files. If you are not satisfied with the existing public servers ( https://www.hello-matrix.net/public_servers.php), you can even host one. On Fri, Mar 17, 2017 at 11:05 PM, Patrick Georgi via coreboot < coreboot(a)coreboot.org> wrote: 2017-03-17 15:50 GMT+01:00 Juliana Rodrigues <juliana.orod(a)gmail.com>: > that I know uses jitsi: https://meet.jit.si > It's MIT, but works very well. Thanks for the pointer. We already tried jitsi, but I think without the bridge service (which only seems to exist for about a year). So, something to re-evaluate, but the last time we tried "works very well" was the opposite of our experience due to bandwidth requirements. Patrick (note to all so I don't have to sound like a grumpy, broken record: Is it FOSS and reasonably popular? Then it's rather likely that we already tried it) -- coreboot mailing list: coreboot(a)coreboot.org https://www.coreboot.org/mailman/listinfo/coreboot -- Please do not send me Microsoft Office/Apple iWork documents. Send OpenDocument instead! http://fsf.org/campaigns/opendocument/ -- coreboot mailing list: coreboot(a)coreboot.org https://www.coreboot.org/mailman/listinfo/coreboot

1 0

coreboot community meeting minutes for March 16th, 2017
by Martin Roth 17 Mar '17

17 Mar '17

Here are the meeting minutes of yesterday's coreboot community meeting. Info about the next meeting (March 31) is at the bottom. ################################################################## # Thursday, March 16, 2017 General coreboot news & discussions * Next coreboot release - 4.6 - scheduled for mid april * What to do about regression about serial console and some AMD boards (Asus M2V)? - … concerning next release - The next release will happen in april with or without regressions. It can be delayed 2 weeks from mid april to the end of april. So we've got 4-6 weeks to find and fix issues if we want them to be fixed in the next release. * What do we do if the commit introducing the regression is found, and cannot be easily reverted? - Fix it? * libgfxinit is working on Haswell / will replace C code for Peppy/Falco - Need to update the coreboot builders to add ADA toolchain Infrastructure Issues & News * Get Clang going again - what do we need to do to get it going? - There are some patches that list the directories to the intrinsic functions, these don't work, so we get errors on division and something else. It's been a while since Martin worked on it, so he can't quite recall. - can we look into adding the intrinsics directly into the coreboot source? * coreboot updated the toolchain - Please rebuild yours. *Jenkins was updated to version 2.32.3 & the plugins * Added new builder "BoringBuilder" - Managed by Philipp. This builder is still occasionally having hiccups, we're trying to stay on top of failed builds while we're figuring out the builder failures. * We've updated the log retention policy for coreboot-gerrit builds. All build results will be kept for 45 days. Previous policy removed logs after 500 builds or 21 days. At 50 builds a day (or more) on a busy weekday, this meant that logs were only kept for 10 days. * The main coreboot server locked up March 15 and needed to be reset. We will be moving pieces over to a new server that we've already got in place. Philipp has volunteered to help with this if needed. * Looking forward to easing GNAT (GCC's Ada frontend) build. * REACTS throws occasional test failures (false negatives) on the KGPE-D16. This may be related to the suspected race condition somewhere in the coreboot console; the logs sent support this by locking up end somewhat randomly in the middle of serial output. Raptor plans to investigate further later this month / early next. Per Martin the KGPE-D16 is not the only board known to be affected by random hangs related to console / serial - This was also seen during the bringup of the camelback mountain board. Development * How do we feel about changing the coding style to move constants in comparisons to the left side? if (0 == x) instead of (x == 0) - The argument for doing this was that this style finds errors in any environment - Ron is very opposed. - There's compiler support for finding the issues this exposes (namely if (x = 0)), which is more robust than a weird style guide. - Concluded that this will be left up to the individual developer, and to disable the checkpatch check. * libgfxinit has a new Linux user-space test tool * libpayload: Mouse cursor patches submitted, needs reviews - Tested using cbui payload * SeaVGABIOS: Improved Windows support, needs some more asm magic to finalize - Windows now works with native graphics init Conference news * Both homepages are WIP. Philipp will fix some issues today. * We are searching for Sponsors of the ECC'17, feel free to contact zaolin(a)coreboot.org if you know companies who might be interested in joining us. Interesting External news items * AMD, Ryzen & coreboot - Will AMD be more open? - https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/837367956229206016 -https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/5x4hxu/we_are_amd_creators_of_athlon_radeon_and_other/def5h1b/ - https://www.golem.de/news/freie-firmware-amd-prueft-coreboot-support-fuer-r… - This will take some time until they respond or they'll ignore us. - Comments from bridgman (closest thing we have to an "inside source") are not promising, but shed light on why the PSP is closed / locked: https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/software/bsd-mac-os-x-hurd-others/938… - AMD does not seem to be aware that the technologies required to secure open systems are already becoming available from at least two third parties (Raptor Engineering, possibly Google) -- how to make them aware? - More to the point -- need to show open, secure systems are profitable or investment in the required new technology will not be made by AMD! ################################################################## Next meeting is March 31, 2017 Check the coreboot calendar for the time in your timezone https://www.coreboot.org/calendar.html Join using the bluejeans web app or the phone bridge: https://bluejeans.com/616384323 Phone bridge call in numbers: https://www.bluejeans.com/numbers Meeting ID: 616384323 Current agenda & history: https://coreboot-meeting.pads.ccc.de/CommunityMeetingTopics

1 0

Re: [coreboot] How come the community meeting is hosted by proprietary software?
by Iru Cai 17 Mar '17

17 Mar '17

Have you tried the Matrix protocol (https://matrix.org) that I mentioned? It supports WebRTC as well as talk with text and files. If you are not satisfied with the existing public servers ( https://www.hello-matrix.net/public_servers.php), you can even host one. On Fri, Mar 17, 2017 at 11:05 PM, Patrick Georgi via coreboot < coreboot(a)coreboot.org> wrote: > 2017-03-17 15:50 GMT+01:00 Juliana Rodrigues <juliana.orod(a)gmail.com>: > > that I know uses jitsi: https://meet.jit.si > > It's MIT, but works very well. > Thanks for the pointer. > > We already tried jitsi, but I think without the bridge service (which > only seems to exist for about a year). > So, something to re-evaluate, but the last time we tried "works very > well" was the opposite of our experience due to bandwidth > requirements. > > > Patrick > (note to all so I don't have to sound like a grumpy, broken record: Is > it FOSS and reasonably popular? Then it's rather likely that we > already tried it) > > -- > coreboot mailing list: coreboot(a)coreboot.org > https://www.coreboot.org/mailman/listinfo/coreboot > -- Please do not send me Microsoft Office/Apple iWork documents. Send OpenDocument instead! http://fsf.org/campaigns/opendocument/

1 0

Re: [coreboot] How come the community meeting is hosted by proprietary software?
by Patrick Georgi 17 Mar '17

17 Mar '17

2017-03-17 15:50 GMT+01:00 Juliana Rodrigues <juliana.orod(a)gmail.com>: > that I know uses jitsi: https://meet.jit.si > It's MIT, but works very well. Thanks for the pointer. We already tried jitsi, but I think without the bridge service (which only seems to exist for about a year). So, something to re-evaluate, but the last time we tried "works very well" was the opposite of our experience due to bandwidth requirements. Patrick (note to all so I don't have to sound like a grumpy, broken record: Is it FOSS and reasonably popular? Then it's rather likely that we already tried it)

1 0

Re: [coreboot] How come the community meeting is hosted by proprietary software?
by Carl-Daniel Hailfinger 17 Mar '17

17 Mar '17

On 17.03.2017 15:50, Juliana Rodrigues wrote: > Don't know if anyone brought this up yet, but the FOSS communities > that I know uses jitsi: https://meet.jit.si Does it work better on low-end devices than it did a year ago? Back then WebRTC was pretty much unusable in the browsers I tried on a Thinkpad T60, mostly due to CPU limitations. (Admittedly I haven't tried Bluejeans on my T60, so I can't compare the two.) Regards, Carl-Daniel

1 0

How come the community meeting is hosted by proprietary software?
by Taiidan＠gmx.com 17 Mar '17

17 Mar '17

Discord is proprietary software, why don't we use something free and open source? I would be more than pleased to set up a SIP server or something to that effect (I have only 10mbps upload but I know folks who will give me a VPS if I want one). There are plenty of FOSS softphones for every OS and you can also use a desktop VoIP phone so it would be more convenient.

6 7

ASUS KGPE-D16 Automated Test Failure [master]
by Raptor Engineering Automated Coreboot Test Stand 17 Mar '17

17 Mar '17

The ASUS KGPE-D16 fails verification for branch master as of commit 75042683183d3b559bcec702e9bc9f0e6da3ec8b The following tests failed: BOOT_FAILURE VIDEO_FAILURE Commits since last successful test: 7504268 google/veyron: Clean out unused board variants 2d99f3b google/veyron: Work around RAM code strapping error See attached log for details This message was automatically generated from Raptor Engineering's ASUS KGPE-D16 test stand Want to test on your own equipment? Check out https://www.raptorengineering.com/content/REACTS/intro.html Raptor Engineering also offers coreboot consulting services! Please visit https://www.raptorengineering.com for more information Please contact Timothy Pearson at Raptor Engineering <tpearson(a)raptorengineering.com> regarding any issues stemming from this notification

1 0

Re: [coreboot] Coreboot wiki: what license is the content under?
by Timothy Pearson 17 Mar '17

17 Mar '17

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 03/16/2017 04:10 PM, Sam Kuper wrote: > On 16/03/2017, Timothy Pearson <tpearson(a)raptorengineering.com> wrote: >> On 03/16/2017 02:27 PM, Sam Kuper wrote: >>> My understanding is that means that much (maybe all) of the >>> documentation in the Coreboot wiki is proprietary (at least, in the >>> overwhelming majority of jurisdictions). IANAL, though. >> >> This is a good point. For what it's worth, anything contributed by >> Raptor Engineering to the Wiki should be considered at least dual >> licensed CC BY-SA 3.0 and GDFL; we'd love to see our content remixed / >> improved by the community as long as attribution and share-alike is >> maintained. > > Thanks. I guess that would be this content? > > https://www.coreboot.org/Special:Contributions/Tpearson > > Looks like there are only 172 additional Coreboot wiki contributors to > account for :) > Yep :-) I just figured that if the major contributors on this list specified a license we'd be well on our way to fixing this! - -- Timothy Pearson Raptor Engineering +1 (415) 727-8645 (direct line) +1 (512) 690-0200 (switchboard) https://www.raptorengineering.com -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1 Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJYywH8AAoJEK+E3vEXDOFbR+QH/2FVBh+Lc9EAkUNBzxixsNnh Iq5w4DoSH5dF+R7qWM2+uXS+tzAWDUOe+I26nOxZxifR9KltGtcQVdghOksRnsNk L8rtj56ujcKsxRKlZHrFVsIvxdVoexzjrFtJmdmPrQRop9EA+Ig/U8ve0n6//4HR GavxPIboCc647iHeabKg1unOOb9a72YU7xYjxE7mAm/Os8vnRQDl8DkeBbJ/+t5l w1cJXLVgEBq6rf1R9oYpaBjuNpYY8QiC1l1/JngYqQQTDmzM6wp2d2J6URonzEPf hj5+SNq9jiSF4xsFZ+WTOoUA5YNzgROKKr/sMSdyrVifmuwCNYQBFHdvDgwVef4= =pTLC -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

2 1

← Newer
1
...
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
...
27
Older →

Jump to page:

2024

2023

2022

2021

2020

2019

2018

2017

2016

2015

2014

2013

2012

2011

2010

2009

2008

2007

2006

2005

2004

2003

2002

coreboot March 2017