On Mon, Oct 4, 2010 at 12:23 PM, Peter Stuge <peter@stuge.se> wrote:

phorsyon wrote:
> a minimal and a consumer version of a certificate

As was mentioned, the more certifications there are, the less easy it
is for the market to make use of them.

I don't think we can afford to try to market two different
certifications. I would only like to try for one; "consumer coreboot"
or rather; "coreboot complete"

Developers don't want problems any more than average users just
because they may know how to deal with problems.

Anyway, if we would have criteria then we could also track them.

Any interested developer could easily discover what was missing for
a board to be coreboot complete, judge if it is a good choice for
them at the moment, and if not just look for completeness of other
boards.

I agree with Peter here, and will add my $0.02 to the thread...

Certification is a *huge* process, at least if you want it to mean anything. I would expect that a true certification effort would rival development of the code itself. Multiple levels of certification only complicate the process and confuse users. And quite honestly, I don't expect that to happen unless a lot of dedicated resources are poured into it.

Perhaps the best thing is simply to publish a giant testing matrix for each board. Certify against the absolute bare minimum technical requirements, ie, can all on-board devices be initialized by firmware, are SMBIOS tables populated, etc. Leave it up to the system builder to decide whether or not if it's usable for the application.

Maybe someone (FSF?) wants to create a higher-level standard that includes Coreboot along with a full free software stack, but that shouldn't be key to Coreboot certification at any level or you risk alienating major commercial partners. Heck, everyone in the Coreboot community ought to be flattered if a major OEM ships a "Made for Win7" computer with Coreboot on it.

Certify stuff that you know, leave everything else up to vendors.