coreboot for the 21st century
setting up the project for the next decade
Purpose: Purge all boards / chipsets / cpus that require ROMCC in romstage and known broken chipsets (sc520, i855)
coreboot is now officially 15 years old. One and a half long decades with ups and downs. During this time we collected over 250 different mainboards. A great achievement, but also a great maintenance burden.
* It is hard to keep 250+ mainboards working. Actually impossible. * Keeping them working comes at a cost. Keep old infrastructure around. Workarounds, special cases * We don’t test except on the very last stuff we’re working on
To fix this issue, we suggest to establish a process to obsolete old hardware in a controlled way. Getting rid of old baggage is great and liberating for future products, but it is also one of the moves the strictly hobbyist community considers corporate driven. Hence, we want to satisfy both a speedy light-weight development process and keeping all the good coreboot legacy alive.
For the first time in 2014, and every few years after that (e.g. every two years), we will create a new “community branch” that focusses on older mainboards. This branch will start out as an exact copy of ToT coreboot. Suggested name: “coreboot-community-2014” or “coreboot-v4.0”. Then this branch will not get any further new feature development (of features not available in ToT) but only bug fixes for boards to get them working and potentially backports.
After the branch is created, all obsoleted mainboards are removed from the main repository. The version will be coreboot 4.1. Cleanup shall begin to remove all the cruft that we had around to get those old boards working. Each mainboard in v4.1 will have a supporter / owner. New mainboards are not admitted into V4.1 without a supporter / owner.
If somebody in the community wants to keep a board / chipset alive in the tree, they can re-import them by cleaning up the board to work with the new, cruft free infrastructure.
In 2016 we will do the same thing again, and it will become coreboot 6.0
Appendix A: romcc boards to be removed
advantech/pcm-5820 asi/mb_5blgp asi/mb_5blmp axus/tc320 bcom/winnet100 bifferos/bifferboard digitallogic/msm586seg dmp/vortex86ex eaglelion/5bcm iei/juki-511p iei/nova4899r intel/jarrell intel/truxton intel/xe7501devkit supermicro/x6dai_g supermicro/x6dhe_g2 supermicro/x6dhe_g supermicro/x6dhr_ig2 supermicro/x6dhr_ig technologic/ts5300 televideo/tc7020 via/epia via/epia-m via/epia-n