Hi coreboot community,
a recent yet-another-blob occurrence reminded me that I wanted to write about the matter for a long time.
Every few months, it seems (if not, more often), a new blob is introduced to coreboot. Alas, this is often hidden to the last minute, creating unnecessary friction and unfortunate, set-in- stone solutions that haunt us for the years to come.
My proposal: How about we set up some guidelines how to proceed when adding support for a new platform that requires any blobs? My vague idea is as follows: Before the very first commit for such a new platform can be merged, a set of predefined, blob related questions (to be discussed) should be answered. This should also apply if a new platform just brings the same kind of blobs with it as its predecessor (e.g. next gen FSP). Situations may change and blobs do too. Speaking of FSP, it's actually a set of many blobs. I think questions should be answered for each part of it individually.
IMO, just answering all questions shouldn't suffice to unlock the merge. If there's some downside that definitely outweighs the benefit of adding the new platform, it should be blocked until the blob situation can change. For instance, we had in the past blobs that needed to be cus- tomized under NDA per board. Something like that doesn't seem to be useful for a free-software project.
What do you think?
Nico