Dear coreboot community.
I guess the most of you have seen the tension that was introduced to the community once Intel started to enable the Programmable Service Engine on the new IOTG SoC called Elkhart Lake (for reference, please see [1]).
One of the outcome of this difficulties was to ask Intel for open sourcing the PSE code in order to avoid a new blob being introduced to coreboot.
I took this action item and reached out to Intel in this regard. As a result I have had two meetings with the responsible people at Intel and they started to look into this request. So as of now Intel is analyzing the code to understand what needs to be done to open source it.
What has been mentioned by Intel to me is that up to now nobody else have ever requested this for the PSE. Furthermore Intel let me know that it would be easier to convince the management layer to spend work on open sourcing the code if there would be more people from different companies requesting the same. My first guess was: we can do this! Therefore I have drafted up an open letter which I would like share with all of you:
https://openletter.earth/request-for-opening-the-source-code-for-the-pse-on-elkhart-lake-26bad82a
The wording have now been reviewed for two days between different parties and I would like to keep it as it is in order to get it done in time.
This is now the moment where you can raise your voice! Please have a look at the open letter and sign it if you agree with the terms and if you support this approach. The more people we get the higher are our chances to be visible as an open source community. And it would be really helpful if we could get this letter signed by companies, this will for sure increase the traction of this request.
I will keep this letter in “signing” state until 2021-12-09 07:00 am German time. Once we are there I will hand it over to Intel.
Thank you for your support in advance
Werner