First, Mono, thank *you* for your interest and involvement in coreboot.

On Sun, Mar 16, 2014 at 2:00 PM, Mono <mono@posteo.de> wrote:

Moreover, I was not aware that the code might do something else than what one can know by reading the code and the public documentation. To be honest, if that was true, I would be disappointed, because I expected coreboot to be a possibility of getting away from private software and "you don't know what your machine does".

Yeah, if only it were this simple ::-)

It was, at some point, but The Empire Struck Back.

At the moment I believe that applying the patch does no harm. At least this is my current knowledge by running it at the MacBook2,1 for a couple of hours. Switching forth and back between coreboot versions (back to safe ones) works. I do not know if this was true for other boards.

Yes, your test is just not a sufficient test. There's a fair amount of systems out there with this chipset. It's easy to create code that works on *your* version of the macbook with *your* rev of the chipset. But what if it breaks an older version, and we don't know for a year until someone reports that his getac just broke? This happens and it's very painful. So the rule is not to change things unless you know it fixes a bug -- and you really need to document that bug.

The problem solving flowchart is very helpful here.

http://goo.gl/5dyhZo

Here's a true story. We once had a 256-or-so node cluster at LANL. Same vendor, same server node, same mainboards, same chipset, 1/2 the boards ran at 15% lower PCI speed than the other half. All chipsets had the same PCI devid, same rev. What was different? We finally got to realizing that 1/2 the chipsets were made at one fab, half another. And that was the reason.

It's very subtle at the lower levels.

ron