On 07.11.21 00:15, Martin Roth wrote:
Nov 6, 2021, 05:49 by nico.h@gmx.de:
On 05.11.21 19:39, Patrick Georgi via coreboot wrote:
It [coreboot] would be dead: while there are still a few folks carefully maintaining i945 and GM45 in this reality, I'm not sure they would have done so in that other reality where there was no help maintaining the payloads (and so coreboot-compatible seabios, tianocore, grub, filo, ... would all be on their plate as well)
That seems an odd assessment. Did you confuse blobs that are "required" in coreboot with blobs that sit in the same storage medium (e.g. ME firmware)? It also seems that you underestimate the individuals in the community.
I don't understand your statement that patrick is underestimating the individuals in the community. Are you saying that people would have worked around the blobs? If so, then why haven't we seen that code. We'd all love it.
Could you explain?
That's so easy to answer that I wonder if you are trolling me? Long story short, if a project is cluttered with blobs, you can't expect people to go on as if that didn't happen.
When people are employed to work on blob support instead of native implementations, they don't have the time to work on the latter. Your scenario was "we'd started refusing blobs when the required blobs started appearing". In such a reality, I assume less people would have been employed to work on blob support. IIRC, there was a time when you couldn't hire anyone for coreboot work because a certain blob supporter already hired all of them.
Also, the upstream project became unfriendly towards solutions that are not carried by the respective silicon vendor. I've witnessed that first hand. For instance, when the first ramstage blobs were added, the whole codebase for Intel silicon was kind of forked inside our own repository, digging a deep ditch between the existing native code and the support for newer platforms. In such an environment, it becomes more unlikely that individuals add coreboot-native code. Somebody has spent months to overcome that ditch btw. and IIRC that was to prepare for some coreboot-native implementation that is already working.
There's also a general reluctance to expect to support a project with free software that has shown that it doesn't take the GPL seriously.
Nico