Dear Timothy,
On 9/2/19 10:17 AM, Timothy Pearson wrote:
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Monday, September 2, 2019 2:56:21 AM
What about following proposal: coreboot is an extended firmware platform that delivers a lightning fast and secure boot experience on modern computers and embedded systems. As an Open Source project it aims to provide auditability and maximum control over technology; On some platforms (especially non-open ISA platforms), some boot functionalities are provided by Silicon Vendor binary blobs.
This is too wordy and full of jargon, and confuses goals.
it was never about the speed. The speed was a nice side effect, but ti was really about the openness. Once you start talking about speed you lose the thread -- we had this problem all the time in 2000: vendors got focused on fast and missed the main point, that we wanted control.
Remember that many people come to coreboot thinking they're going to load a usb stick up and install it somehow. Few people have any clue what's going on here.
You need fewer adjectives, and simpler words.
Apologies, but I'm a bit confused -- just a bit earlier it sounded like the open / control aspects were now secondary to market share and vendor contribution concerns. Did I pick up the wrong impression?
Ron, “lightning fast” is mentioned in the current text on the Web site already.
If coreboot is indeed supposed to be focusing on those two attributes, this text needs to be completely rewritten to clearly show where the limits are on modern x86 platforms. No more molly-coddling the ME/PSP, it needs to be very clear where coreboot is locked out by vendor dictate and (as a result) what coreboot cannot fix without a change of direction from the silicon vendors.
"coreboot is an open firmware platform with its primary goal as a fully owner controlled, secure boot experience. For open ISA and other owner controlled systems, it currently provides an auditable, secure boot environment for silicon vendors, large organizations, and individual developers. For restricted systems, such as modern x86 platforms, it provides a compatible end stage loader and firmware module framework for proprietary vendor binaries.".
This might be a bit strongly worded, but you can see where I'm trying to go with it?
Basically, I agree with Timothy on the problem and the user confusion. Puri.sm basically omits the FSP in all their blog posts, and the user gets the impression, that the whole firmware is free software [1].
I think, we can work on improving the text, and it’s great that Patrick posted proposals.
I believe, we should a agree on a few thinks first though.
1. I do not think, that the openness of the ISA plays any role for coreboot, so it does not need to be mentioned on the main page, and should be moved.
2. Should the Intel ME and PSP be seen as independent devices like the embedded controller? In my opinion it should be, and therefore, also does not need to be mentioned on the main page. (Unless somebody comes up with a succinct wording.)
3. So, that leaves FSP and AMD Binary PI for x86 (and other blobs for ARM). I believe, this should be mentioned in some way.
If you agree, I propose the text below, where *Open Source* is moved to the beginning, and *framework* added in the end.
coreboot is an extended Open Source firmware platform that delivers a lightning fast and secure boot experience on modern computers and embedded systems. The project aims to provide auditability and maximum control over technology. But, the framework also allows to include binary blobs to initialize certain devices.
Maybe some native speaker finds better wording.
Kind regards,
Paul