Hello Ron,
I agree with most what you are saying in general. However, I find it very concerning that you make it about Quark. Are you sure you are not just jumping on the bandwagon because people started to pick on Quark? There are probably many boards in the tree that are even more abandoned and their platform code was in worth shape from the beginning. Let's not make arbitrary choices what to move and what not.
On 15.04.22 22:38, ron minnich wrote:
I think quark revival should come with a reasonable deadline. IOW, if people are serious about keeping this platform, I think we ought to see commitments as to when they report that it works. I'd suggest July
We already have rules when to announce and when to actually move things to abandoned branches. Let's not make arbitrary exceptions.
We've had a lot of commitments before, but everyone is busy, and hopes can outrun reality. It should not take more than a few hours to verify that this board or does not work.
The same seems true about many other boards in the tree. Why don't you demand the same for them?
Keeping an old platform is not zero cost. It comes with costs for running CI, keeping it up to date as other parts of coreboot evolve, and dealing with build failures that can occur as it falls out of date. Those costs are all externalized, for most of us, to Patrick and Martin, but they do exist.
In round numbers, coreboot is at about 5k commits/year (last time I looked; maybe it's higher or lower now). Assuming each CL takes around ten builds, that's 50,000 builds, times 350 boards, which translates to "a lot." It keeps Martin's house warm, I suspect. That's not counting the continuous builds that go on for Chromebooks at Google, Intel, and many other places. These builds all include Quark. To put it another way, Quark has a CO2 footprint. There ought to be usage to justify this cost.
Speaking of builds in other places and CO2 footprint, wouldn't it reduce the coreboot CI's CO2 footprint by roughly 33% if we would stop build testing Chromebooks twice (with and without the CHROMEOS option enabled)? I'm not saying we should do it. But there are much lower hanging fruits than Quark. So I don't understand why this is brought up for the latter.
I'm told that 1% or so of our mainboards are dependent on quark. As far as I know, there are 0 quark boards out there using coreboot. We
WDYM? why would you know who is using coreboot on their Galileo board and who isn't?
seem to be putting an awful lot of effort into a board with no users -- a board and chip that, furthermore, has been dead for several years, and was never that great to begin with.
Can you please elaborate on that "awful lot of effort"?
Nico