Dear coreboot community
This is the report of yesterdays community meeting:
General coreboot news & Discussion ==================================
There is patch [1] up for review that implements LinuxBoot as payload. - Currently with u-root in the initrd, which is an userspace entirely written in go; - Currently only as a payload but in the future it could replace ramstage on some targets; - Currently its still WIP and doesn't work all that well with qemu targets; - It needs some Kconfig options for some simple example configurations; - In the future we also want to integrate the HEADS[2] userspace and possibly also an userspace featuring the petitboot kexec gui[3];
The 4.7 release is imminent and Martin will hopefully be able to finish up the releasenotes this weekend. The 4.6 release announced that after the 4.7 release platforms lacking the early cbmem feature will be removed from the master branch. Those platforms can then live in the 4.7 branch or be reintegrated when early cbmem support is implemented. The details about how and when this will happen have yet to be decided/discussed.
Development ===========
There was some discussion about how to move forward to use the new ACPI ASL 2.0 syntax, which is considered more readable. There previously was a discussion on this topic on the mailing list [4]. Currently it is possible with iasl to compile and decompile our ASL sources to the new syntax but this would lose all our comments, so ideally a new tool would need to be written to handle that transition. It was also suggested that given the fact that coreboot has reproducibel timeless builds, it would be able to tell if anything changed in the resulting binary, which it shouldn't since the resulting bytecode ought to be the same.
In the mean time we still need to have a discussion about what do with for instance new asl source files: do we still want the old syntax or is the new syntax ok for new files? Mixing syntaxes in existing files seemed a bad idea.
So what are your ideas and opinions on this?
Infrastructure ==============
The pre-commit hook doesn't return failures on 'make lint-stable' but this seems to be fixed in [5].
Documentation =============
Currently there is an effort going on to have the documentation accessible in one place on the web. The current idea was to use hugo for static webpage generation for this, see [6]. Some concerns were however raised that this particular theme works rather poorly without javascript, so it might be desirable to find a better lightweight theme. Related to this, is the ongoing effort to convert our current documentation to markdown and move those files to a different directory which starts with lowercase letter for consistency, with a separation of a content and a static folder. The idea to use netlify to push it to the production server was also suggested. (Philipp might be able to say something in more details about this)
Flashrom 1.0 was released! This new release has some nice new features that make handling some blobs like the IFD/GBE/ME/... on Intel systems much easier. One can now with the --ifd flag fetch the flash layout from flash and use this to read/write/erase those regions. Also a --noverify-all or -N flag was introduced which skips verifying regions that were not touched at all, which can greatly speed up flashing if one is only writing to a small region on a large flash. Our guides however need to be adapted to use these features. One example where this has already been done is [7] which still has the old instructions for reference. In the future flashrom will support Linux MTD (memory technology device) which can remove the need to boot Linux without strict checking of MMIO memory regions (currently flashrom needs the iomem=relaxed boot parameter to use the internal programmer).
I hope you can join us next time!
Kind regards
Arthur
[1] https://review.coreboot.org/#/c/coreboot/+/23071/ [2] https://trmm.net/Heads [3] https://github.com/ArthurHeymans/petitboot_for_coreboot [4] https://mail.coreboot.org/pipermail/coreboot/2016-September/082050.html [5] https://review.coreboot.org/#/c/coreboot/+/23130/ [6] https://www.coreboot.org/Documentation/ [7] https://www.coreboot.org/Board:lenovo/x200#Flashing_your_coreboot_ROM_image