Here are the meeting minutes of yesterday's coreboot community meeting. Info about the next meeting (March 31) is at the bottom.
################################################################## # Thursday, March 16, 2017
General coreboot news & discussions * Next coreboot release - 4.6 - scheduled for mid april * What to do about regression about serial console and some AMD boards (Asus M2V)? - … concerning next release - The next release will happen in april with or without regressions. It can be delayed 2 weeks from mid april to the end of april. So we've got 4-6 weeks to find and fix issues if we want them to be fixed in the next release. * What do we do if the commit introducing the regression is found, and cannot be easily reverted? - Fix it? * libgfxinit is working on Haswell / will replace C code for Peppy/Falco - Need to update the coreboot builders to add ADA toolchain
Infrastructure Issues & News * Get Clang going again - what do we need to do to get it going? - There are some patches that list the directories to the intrinsic functions, these don't work, so we get errors on division and something else. It's been a while since Martin worked on it, so he can't quite recall. - can we look into adding the intrinsics directly into the coreboot source? * coreboot updated the toolchain - Please rebuild yours. *Jenkins was updated to version 2.32.3 & the plugins * Added new builder "BoringBuilder" - Managed by Philipp. This builder is still occasionally having hiccups, we're trying to stay on top of failed builds while we're figuring out the builder failures. * We've updated the log retention policy for coreboot-gerrit builds. All build results will be kept for 45 days. Previous policy removed logs after 500 builds or 21 days. At 50 builds a day (or more) on a busy weekday, this meant that logs were only kept for 10 days. * The main coreboot server locked up March 15 and needed to be reset. We will be moving pieces over to a new server that we've already got in place. Philipp has volunteered to help with this if needed. * Looking forward to easing GNAT (GCC's Ada frontend) build. * REACTS throws occasional test failures (false negatives) on the KGPE-D16. This may be related to the suspected race condition somewhere in the coreboot console; the logs sent support this by locking up end somewhat randomly in the middle of serial output. Raptor plans to investigate further later this month / early next. Per Martin the KGPE-D16 is not the only board known to be affected by random hangs related to console / serial - This was also seen during the bringup of the camelback mountain board.
Development * How do we feel about changing the coding style to move constants in comparisons to the left side? if (0 == x) instead of (x == 0) - The argument for doing this was that this style finds errors in any environment - Ron is very opposed. - There's compiler support for finding the issues this exposes (namely if (x = 0)), which is more robust than a weird style guide. - Concluded that this will be left up to the individual developer, and to disable the checkpatch check. * libgfxinit has a new Linux user-space test tool * libpayload: Mouse cursor patches submitted, needs reviews - Tested using cbui payload * SeaVGABIOS: Improved Windows support, needs some more asm magic to finalize - Windows now works with native graphics init
Conference news * Both homepages are WIP. Philipp will fix some issues today. * We are searching for Sponsors of the ECC'17, feel free to contact zaolin@coreboot.org if you know companies who might be interested in joining us.
Interesting External news items * AMD, Ryzen & coreboot - Will AMD be more open? - https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/837367956229206016 -https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/5x4hxu/we_are_amd_creators_of_athlon_r... - https://www.golem.de/news/freie-firmware-amd-prueft-coreboot-support-fuer-ry... - This will take some time until they respond or they'll ignore us. - Comments from bridgman (closest thing we have to an "inside source") are not promising, but shed light on why the PSP is closed / locked: https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/software/bsd-mac-os-x-hurd-others/9380... - AMD does not seem to be aware that the technologies required to secure open systems are already becoming available from at least two third parties (Raptor Engineering, possibly Google) -- how to make them aware? - More to the point -- need to show open, secure systems are profitable or investment in the required new technology will not be made by AMD!
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Next meeting is March 31, 2017 Check the coreboot calendar for the time in your timezone https://www.coreboot.org/calendar.html
Join using the bluejeans web app or the phone bridge: https://bluejeans.com/616384323
Phone bridge call in numbers: https://www.bluejeans.com/numbers Meeting ID: 616384323
Current agenda & history: https://coreboot-meeting.pads.ccc.de/CommunityMeetingTopics