Dear community,
Please note that the upcoming coreboot leadership meeting is scheduled for Wednesday, February 7, 2024. [1]
You are welcome to update the current agenda items with matters you wish to see addressed during the meeting. [2]
## Current Agenda Items
### [Martin/Felix] Switching to BigBlueButton.
* The upcoming meeting in two weeks will take place on BigBlueButton instead of Google Chat.
Further information will be published to the mailing list between this Wednesday's meeting and the following one.
### [FelixS] Building a community FSP for Intel based platforms
* Initial coreboot support for Intel consumer platforms mostly comes with Google Chromebooks.
* coreboot support for a wide range of mainboards is only possible if Intel releases FSP binaries.
For some platforms Intel refuses to release a FSP binary and Intel also refuses to fix issues
within FSP.
* How to make coreboot more independent? People have tried convincing Intel to make FSP open
source. It seems unlikely that anything in that regard happens any time soon.
* As a compromise, I am proposing to build our own FSP from scratch that is built by the community,
specifically companies. It's still meant to be closed-source, since Intel won't allow us to write
open source code, but then we are able to extend and improve it whenever we want.
* Will Intel allow us to distribute our own binaries if the code is completely written by
ourselves?
* Possible issues
* Getting a multi-party NDA
* Getting a license so that we are allowed to distribute it
* [Werner]The license that comes with the FSP code that I am aware of explicitly inhibits code
changes and productive use of self-built binaries. How would we ensure this?
* [FelixS] AFAIK the standard license allows us to do code changes but it doesn’t allow us
distributing the binary over let’s say a website. So I am wondering if it’s different with
something we build ourselves.
* [Sheng] Do you have connections with Intel folks to make this happen or initiate the discussion?
Is there a solid plan for this, to outline the goals, process, and details with Intel? Or is this
just a mere suggestion that is probably not very practical? Since this is not an Intel specific
issue, how about AMD? This won't happen overnight - who is going to lead this initiative with
Silicon vendors, initiate discussions and meetings (and it will be a difficult and consuming
process), collect feedback from all parties, and craft out a solid plan to move ahead?
* [Martin] In coreboot’s agreement with SFC, we agreed that any and all software and/or
documentation developed and maintained by the Project and the Project’s participants will be
distributed solely as Free Software.
* Because of this agreement, while this proposed FSP could be interesting to the coreboot group,
it’s not, and cannot be, coreboot project. Since we wouldn’t be able to open source the proposed
FSP, I’m not even convinced that it’s something that should be discussed in this meeting.
### [Arthur] Status update on ARM LBBR bootflow (was asked last meeting)
* Nothing to discuss so not sure if this needs to be on the agenda.
* Things are progressing along with the LBBR Engineering Change Request to include other bootflow
recommendations where coreboot is BL1
* It’s an industry wide spec, so a wide range of partners were asked for input, which takes time
* [Martin] We were told in a previous leadership meeting back in October or November that the
decision of what to include in the spec would be made at a meeting in January, which is why we
pushed so hard to get the decision about the ARM coreboot solutions to be wrapped up.
* As far as it being on the agenda, I think even letting us know that things are just progressing
but not resolved yet is information that should be shared instead of just leaving people wondering
what’s going on.
* When should we expect an actual update? June? December? 2025?
* When are the patches in question expecting to be merged?
### [Elyes] revert & get rid of write{8,16,32,64}p (readXXp? ).
* See Julius’s comment here:
(https://review.coreboot.org/c/coreboot/+/80193)
### [Martin] coreboot 24.02 release in just under 2 weeks
* Release planned for Feb 19
[1](https://coreboot.org/calendar.html).
[2](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NRXqXcLBp5pFkHiJbrLdv3Spqh1Hu086HYkK….
Issue #121 has been updated by Patrick Rudolph.
It might be possible that testing on my side was a false positive and I was just lucky that the issue didn't appear within time.
As it's unclear what the issue is about I'm just poking in the dark, comparing the reference code (MRC.bin) with coreboot's native code.
Anything that could help narrowing it down as described here: https://ticket.coreboot.org/issues/121#note-80 would help to fix it.
----------------------------------------
Bug #121: T520: Hangs in OS
https://ticket.coreboot.org/issues/121#change-1742
* Author: Firstname Lastname
* Status: In Progress
* Priority: Normal
* Category: chipset configuration
* Start date: 2017-06-09
* Affected hardware: SNB, IVY
* Affected OS: -
----------------------------------------
I have been running coreboot since 2017.04.15 and have experienced hangs ever since then. It was suggested by folk on the IRC that I run memtest to check for incorrect raminit causing errors, however I have run memtest for 12 hours straight with no errors.
Due to the ambiguous nature of the hangs (immediate freeze with no warning signs, audio gets stuck repeating the last 50ms or so of noise, not sure what this effect is called) I don't have much useful information other than the .config and dmesg. However one thing I can say with high confidence is that the hangs occur significantly more frequently in Linux (*buntu distros) than Windows 10. Within an hour of launching Linux a hang is likely, whereas Windows typically runs for many hours before a hang occurs. I considered this an insignificant anecdotal anomaly at first but over the course of the nearly 2 months I have been running coreboot it seems to be a solid trend. The hangs occur anywhere, typically during mere desktop usage or basic web browsing.
Additionally there is another form of hang I experience where the screen goes black except for some sort of graphical corruption down the left side (http://i.imgur.com/4zWrlpX.jpg), whether this is related to the more common total freeze hangs I don't know but I figured I should include it nonetheless. These hangs only occur about 1:20 compared to the regular hangs.
---Files--------------------------------
config (20.7 KB)
dmesg.txt (57.3 KB)
cbmem-raminit.txt (62 KB)
lspci.txt (29.6 KB)
cpuinfo.txt (3.94 KB)
defconfig (1023 Bytes)
defconfig (699 Bytes)
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# 2024-01-24 - coreboot Leadership Meeting
## Attendees
Martin Roth, Felix Singer, Julius Werner, Arthur Heymans, David Hendricks, Jonathan Hall, Matt
DeVillier, Felix Held, Patrick Georgi, Werner Zeh, Mina Asante, Nicholas Chin, Subrata Banik, Nico
Huber, Marshall Dawson, Maximilian Brune.
## Open Action Items
* 2024-01-10
* [Open] Werner: Push patch based on https://ticket.coreboot.org/issues/522
* Nico: https://review.coreboot.org/q/topic:enforce_region_api
* [Open] Daniel: Look at how we want to localize (non console) strings for coreboot. Long term
project.
* 2023-11-01
* [Started] Martin: Shallow submodules - document & test, then update submodules if testing goes
well. Additionally look at whether the .branch option helps.
* We can save over 900MB by using shallow submodules.
* [Projects & RFCs](https://docs.google.com/document/d/15H2m4swdESSgGaIuINOePkyst8b39Y7Lu….
* Making progress - see email thread.
* 2023-10-4
* Martin: Write a tutorial for gerrit - Feel free to
help.[Started](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Z8igNdgBG5_Qlr4kKRtlbpKa….
* [Open] OSFF: Look into making a video about using gerrit.
* Discussed with Christian who felt this was a good plan.
* Look at next year.
* [Open] Martin: Write a document about vendorcode submodules.
## Minutes
### [Martin] [Review corebootprojects](https://docs.google.com/document/d/15H2m4swdESSgGaIuINOeP….
* See coreboot projects document
### [Martin] Review coreboot RFCs in gerrit
* https://review.coreboot.org/c/coreboot/+/57861
* Abandon
* https://review.coreboot.org/c/coreboot/+/62015
* Please review.
### [Martin & Felix]: coreboot infra discussion:
- Is there any reason to consider moving to external services like gerrithub & github?
- No?
- coreboot.org hosts some private repos. Some cloud services claim ownership over everything.
- Hidden costs?
- Move Jenkins to a separate server
- Can we use a build server, or is that too much of a security risk?
- Some maintenance tasks are co-hosted.
- What’s the problem if jenkins gets hacked?
- Patches get marked as verified.
- Can we reduce the saved logs that are no longer needed and only keep the ones that are important?
- Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a way to do that. Jenkins doesn’t have separate controls
for even passed & failed builds, let alone builds that have been superseded by newer builds.
* Decision: Rent a dedicated server with ECC memory and hard drives for storage. Start looking at
moving jenkins over. We can look at moving the other services in the future.
## Hetzner servers
“Ideal” machine for coreboot services
* 8 cores with SMT
* 64 GiB ECC Memory
* 2x 512 GB NVMe drives RAID 1
* 2x 12 TB HDDs RAID1
* 12TB because 6TB drives are €17/month, 12 TB drives are €23. This can be used for backups & Jenkins logs/artifacts.
* We could probably get away without a 2nd drive & RAID, but it seems more professional to have the
redundancy.
### Hetzner AMD servers
|[SX134] Mid-range Client CPU|[AX52] Mid-range Client CPU|[AX102] High-End Client CPU|[AX161] Server CPU|
|:-------------------------- |:--------------------------|:--------------------------|:---------------- |
| € 260.37 Germany | € 128.04 Germany | € 176.83 Germany | €240 Germany |
| € 247.28 Finland | € 122.09 Finland | € 170.88 Finland | €227 Finland |
| | | | |
| AMD Ryzen 7 3700X | AMD Ryzen 7 7700 | AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D | AMD EPYC7502P |
| 8 Cores | 8 Cores | 16 Cores | 32 Cores |
| | | | |
| 128 GiB DDR4 ECC | 64 GiB DDR5 ECC | 128 GiB DDR5 ECC | 128 GiB DDR4 ECC |
| | | | |
| 2x 960 GB NVMe | 2x 1 TB NVMe | 2x 1.9 TB NVMe | 2x 1 TB NVMe |
| | | | |
| 10x 16 TB SATA HDD | 2x 12 TB SATA HDD | 2x 12 TB SATA HDD | 2x 12 TB SATAHDD | | | | | |
* Here are relevant links to Hetzner AMD servers:
- [SX134](https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/sx134/configurator#)
- [AX52](https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/ax52/configurator#)
- [AX102](https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/ax102/configurator#)
- [AX161](https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/ax161/configurator#)
### Hetzner Intel Servers
| [EX44] Mid-range Client CPU | [EX101] High-end Client CPU | [EX130-R] Server CPU |
|:----------------------------|:----------------------------|:---------------------|
| € 99.48 Germany | € 153.03 Germany | € 212.53 Germany |
| € 93.53 Finland | € 147.08 Finland | € 206.58 Finland |
| | | |
| Intel® Core™ i5-13500 | Intel® Core™ i9-13900 | Intel Xeon Gold 5412U|
| 6 P-cores 8 E-cores | 8 P-cores 16 E-cores | 24-cores |
| | | |
| 64 GiB DDR4 non-ECC | 64 GiB DDR5 ECC | 256 GiB DDR5 ECC |
| | | |
| 2 x 512 GB (Gen4) | 2 x 1.92 TB (Gen4) | 2 x 1.9 TB (Gen4) |
| | | |
| 2x 12 TB SATA HDD | 2x 12 TB SATA HDD | 2x 12 TB SATA HDD |
| | | |
* Here are relevant links to Hetzner Intel Servers:
- [EX44](https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/ex44/configurator#)
- [EX101](https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/ex101/configurator#)
- [EX130-R](https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/ex130-r/configurator#)
### [SimonG] (cannot attend this week, so will skip Coreboot Control Block)
# Next meeting
* February 7, 2024.
* [Meeting link](https://meet.google.com/pyt-newq-rbb)
* [coreboot Calendar](https://coreboot.org/calendar.html)
# Notice
* Decisions shown here are not necessarily final, and are based
on the current information available. If there are questions or comments
about decisions made, or additional information to present, please put
it on the leadership meeting agenda and show up if possible to discuss
it.
Of course items may also be discussed on the mailing list, but as it's
difficult to interpret tone over email, controversial topics frequently
do not have good progress in those discussions. For particularly
difficult issues, it may be best to try to schedule another meeting.
# coreboot leadership meeting minutes
* [2024-01-24](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NRXqXcLBp5pFkHiJbrLdv3Spqh1….
One of the tasks I've had in my queue for a bit is to look into shallow submodules for coreboot.
TLDR, we can decrease the submodule data size by over 900GB by using shallow submodules.
The idea behind shallow submodules is that by default, we don't pull down as much data. For most submodules, most people typically only use the single commit pointed to by the submodule pointer. This means that people are spending time pulling down commits and then storing data that they don't typically need.
The downside of shallow submodules (and shallow git repos in general) is that they don't contain the full data for the repository, so you can't immediately look at the full history or check out other versions.
There are a couple of ways to limit the amount of data being fetched by a git repository.
- You can fetch a single branch
- You can fetch a limited amount of the git repo's history, either by date or by number of commits.
This explores those possibilities.
Currently if you download everything in the coreboot tree, along with the full submodules you get 1.4GB of data:
226MB of data after downloading the just coreboot repo, but before downloading submodules.
Then another 1.2GB of data for all of the submodules.
Changing the submodules to pull down a depth of 1 commit, we fetch just 208MB of data, a much more reasonable size than 1.2GB
Pulling down the full branch used for each submodule increases the submodule size to 769MB.
Here's a spreadsheet with the submodule size data, along for recommendations for each.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1DAnFFnoLxdLE15CsUTE_AuCZeKG-UdrBndi… <https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1DAnFFnoLxdLE15CsUTE_AuCZeKG-UdrBndi…>
Submodules recommended to use --depth=1 are: arm-trusted-firmware, intel-sec-tools, stm, chromeec, blobs, fsp, vboot
All other submodules would fetch the current branch.
My thought is that we set the default for each submodule to the recommended value in the sheet, then we can add a Make target or Kconfig option that pulls down the rest, for anyone who wants the full data. Once you've pulled down the entire history of a repo, it won't get removed, so the update (mostly) only needs to be done once for historic data. You'd need to do it again after any submodule update to get the full recent commit history though.
Unrelated to the submodules or any proposed changes, to thin the coreboot repo out a bit, you can limit how far back the coreboot history goes, and ignore branches other than main by running a command like this:
`git clone https://review.coreboot.org/coreboot.git coreboot-https --shallow-since=2020-01-01 --branch=main --single-branch`
This pulls down 127MB of data instead of the full 226MB. Obviously you can change the date as desired to get more or less history.
If at some point, you decide you want the rest of the data for that repo, you can run `git fetch --unshallow`.
One note on pulling less history for the coreboot repo - Make sure you get the latest tag, or your coreboot version id will be wrong and confusing.
Let me know what you think about updating the submodules as recommended.
Martin