On 11/23/2018 10:28 AM, Felix Held wrote:
I get the impressions that a few people are quite vocal on the mailing list about keeping stuff in the master branch that fell into disrepair and hinders the project in moving forward and improving things.
I can agree yes some stuff that clearly no longer works should be removed from master but people were talking about for instance removing the native fam15h boards KGPE-D16 and KCMA-D8 (last and best owner controlled libre firmware x86 boards and arguably the best examples of coreboot ports and hw init code) because they thought they didn't have a working S3 mode without soliciting someone to test it until I reported back that it still works (I use it all the time and tested it in master).
I feel as though at the current rate of people being too eager to remove still functional boards for arbitrary reasons there won't be any easily obtainable non development boards on master - another side issue is that coreboot repos don't contain the libs required to compile the older versions which are becoming increasingly unavailable with some only downloadable from a single site hence I suggest the direct hosting of them rather than requiring people to download from third party websites that may or may not work in the future.
There needs to be some type of solution to this issue or in so many years coreboot master will no longer be an open source firmware project since it will only be able to initiate new x86 systems that happen to require binary blobs.
I have never met a comp-sci/comp-engineering graduate or anyone in a computer field who has heard of coreboot and that needs to change - there needs to be some type of advertising so that there can be more than a few wizards capable of the dark arts of firmware editing and who have the time and resources to deal with arbitrary continued maintenance.
but those few people seem to mostly complain, but don't either contribute patches to be merged in upstream master or hire people to fix things.
I have provided technical support to over 100 coreboot users and have enticed many more to procure a supported board and start using it, I also donate to projects and provide hardware to developers when I can...the ways you say are not the only ways to contribute :D