Hi Jonathan,
thanks for your email. It's become very rare that developers take part in mailing-list discussions when they are asked to. So it's really appreciated.
On 27.01.20 17:21, Jonathan Zhang (Infra) wrote:
On 1/26/20, 11:32 AM, "Nico Huber" nico.h@gmx.de wrote:
Hi David,On 26.01.20 20:15, David Hendricks wrote:
On Sat, Jan 25, 2020 at 4:44 PM Nico Huber nico.h@gmx.de wrote:
There are currently two new platforms in development that seem to have trouble with public binaries (which would be necessary to make the code useful to the coreboot community). Namely, AMD/Picasso and Intel/Skylake-SP. Support for the former is already partially rotting on our master branch. Shouldn't we discuss their fate before more resources are wasted?
I happen to know that for the latter the whole point of uploading it in its current state was to get some feedback. The authors gave a live demo of it last fall at the OCP Summit in Europe and wanted to finally get some code published, which itself was quite a feat.
As for their fate, I think we need to look forward and not just backward. The code was pushed upstream with the intent of being used in real products and not just for the fun of putting a bunch of unusable code on display and making peoples' lives difficult. It also serves as a starting point for future work.
That said, it's fair to say that if nothing uses that code then perhaps it should be removed from the master branch. In Picasso's case, there is a mainboard in progress (CB:33772), and given the timeline I suspect there was a previous board that got cancelled (stuff doesn't always go as planned...). In Skylake-SP and Tioga Pass case, the hardware already exists and is in production but the blob situation might prevent it from being usable by the community, but the code is already being used as a starting point for the next generation platform.
sounds like good progress. Though, you make it look like SKL-SP support is just a code drop. If there is no intention to get it into shape and working with upstream coreboot, together with the community, should we merge it? Jonathan seems to work hard to clean the patches "formally into shape" (i.e. fixing checkpatch issues), but that's not all that matters, is it?
It is NOT just a code drop.
Don't worry. Maybe that came out wrong. What I meant is that /if/ the SKL-SP code will not be usable by anyone else, there'll probably be little interest in the community to work on it. Hence, the code would likely just stay as is. So what upstream it for? (that's not a retho- rical question, I'm really asking for expectations)
We had this before: Something that nobody really cared about was upstreamed. And then later, it was copied for newer platforms and people were confused by the feedback that they didn't get for the original platform's code (they expected that what was acceptable for the platform that nobody cared about would always be accepted). I'm not saying that this is the wrong way. Just that from my point of view, we had bad experience with it.
It is backed up by a huge commitment, multi-company collaboration and a long term roadmap.
Sounds nice. If it's really long term, i.e. covering more than a few months, maybe it's even worth to add that roadmap to coreboot's Documentation/ folder? Generally, in my experience, the more infor- mation is available before a review, the better the review will be.
For some context, please refer to [1] and [2]. The intention of this upstream is to get reviews from the community, and in turn to enable the community to work on coreboot support for Xeon Scalable Processors based servers, with this patch set as a start point.
Yeah, but what I don't understand so far: Where is one supposed to get the required blob? And who produced it anyway? Does an NDA with Intel suffice? or does it need a three-party NDA with Intel and Facebook? For which (future?) platform can we expect a public binary if any?
This seems critical to me. With little documentation (if any at all) about the silicon initialization, no documentation about the blob (I assume?) and no binaries to at least test it, what do you expect from the review?
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVmx9n5FyDI [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvAnj0k54Jw
Thanks. Um, do you have anything that is not on Youtube? One of the nice things of the mailing list is that it's archived. But that applies only to information inline in the e-mail, of course. Also, personally, I would prefer something with less java-script, less commercials, and less tracking.
Nico