On Sat, Jan 25, 2020 at 4:44 PM Nico Huber nico.h@gmx.de wrote:
Hello coreboot fellows,
we've recently seen the deprecation of Intel/Broadwell-DE support because it turned out to be too proprietary to be maintained in the long run.
To be fair, the FSP 1.0 platforms (Broadwell-DE, Baytrail, Rangeley) had a pretty long run in master. It was only when certain important coreboot features were introduced and plenty of warning that FSP 1.0 needed to be deprecated that those SoCs were deemed unmaintainable in master and moved to 4.11_branch.
Heck, even after that platforms are still being released using that code such as the Librem Server. It's still used and maintained, just not in the master branch.
There are currently two new platforms in development that seem to have trouble with public binaries (which would be necessary to make the code useful to the coreboot community). Namely, AMD/Picasso and Intel/Skylake-SP. Support for the former is already partially rotting on our master branch. Shouldn't we discuss their fate before more resources are wasted?
I happen to know that for the latter the whole point of uploading it in its current state was to get some feedback. The authors gave a live demo of it last fall at the OCP Summit in Europe and wanted to finally get some code published, which itself was quite a feat.
As for their fate, I think we need to look forward and not just backward. The code was pushed upstream with the intent of being used in real products and not just for the fun of putting a bunch of unusable code on display and making peoples' lives difficult. It also serves as a starting point for future work.
That said, it's fair to say that if nothing uses that code then perhaps it should be removed from the master branch. In Picasso's case, there is a mainboard in progress (CB:33772), and given the timeline I suspect there was a previous board that got cancelled (stuff doesn't always go as planned...). In Skylake-SP and Tioga Pass case, the hardware already exists and is in production but the blob situation might prevent it from being usable by the community, but the code is already being used as a starting point for the next generation platform.