You are just, with this desperate chit-chat, fueling INTEL's big EGO.
Please, continue to do so! INTEL, at the end of the day, will thank
you for that! :-))

Please keep things civil. Whatever you think of Intel and FSP, this is a good opportunity to improve support for coreboot and others reading this thread would like to see progress.



From: coreboot <coreboot-bounces@coreboot.org> on behalf of Zoran Stojsavljevic <zoran.stojsavljevic@gmail.com>
Sent: Monday, April 30, 2018 9:58:33 AM
To: Nico Huber
Cc: Nathaniel L Desimone; Furquan Shaikh; Vincent Palatin; coreboot@coreboot.org; Aaron Durbin; Stefan Reinauer; Martin Roth; ron minnich; Shelley Chen; Julius Werner; Vadim Bendebury; Nick Vaccaro; Chris Ching; Duncan Laurie; Subrata Banik
Subject: Re: [coreboot] Why do we have FSP-S
 
Nico, Aaron,

You are just, with this desperate chit-chat, fueling INTEL's big EGO.
Please, continue to do so! INTEL, at the end of the day, will thank
you for that! :-))

Zoran
_______

On Mon, Apr 30, 2018 at 4:48 PM, Nico Huber <nico.h@gmx.de> wrote:
> Hello Aaron,
>
> thanks for your reply.
>
> On 30.04.2018 05:22, Aaron Durbin wrote:
>> On Sat, Apr 28, 2018 at 7:16 AM, Nico Huber <nico.h@gmx.de> wrote:
>>> Hello coreboot folks, hello Intel and Google coreboot developers,
>>>
>>> back on Tuesday, some of us discovered a commit on gerrit [1] that
>>> implements (another) foreign interface inside coreboot. Discussing
>>
>> It's more of a bridge into coreboot's infrastructure, imo.
>
> It is. Anyway, maybe discuss that in another thread or on gerrit.
>
>>
>>> it didn't go well and I kind of bursted. I feel sorry about that now
>>> (especially because I got too personal).
>>>
>>> One of the causes for this clash definitely was that things apparently
>>> were discussed before but not with coreboot (i.e. this coreboot mailing
>>> list). So I'll try to take the general discussion here, but I've to
>>> start some years back, where you lost me.
>>>
>>> Some questions (that I believe have to be answered) right away. I'll
>>> argue about why later, so these won't get lost (in an already too long
>>> email):
>>>
>>>
>>> TLDR;
>>> For Google:
>>> You kind of introduced blobs in coreboot (with Sandy Bridge) which was
>>> a simple jump-in-jump-out thing and kind of accepted. The argument was
>>> that the things it does aren't documented by Intel anymore, AFAIR. But
>>> with Broadwell suddenly another blob emerged (in ramstage) some
>>> `refcode.elf` AIUI. It turned out, later, that this blob (also) does
>>> things that were open source for Haswell (and would work verbatim on
>>> Broadwell). It seems to play a role comparable to FSP-S.
>>>   o What's the story behind this blob?
>>>   o Why was it introduced?
>>>   o Was there more than IP concerns? Time to market pressure maybe?
>>
>> Saying it's comparable to FSP-S is apt. The story is, like most
>> things, that it has specific things that are not architectural that
>> Intel thinks they need to be secret. Typical settings are related to
>> power management. When needing to be competitive in the laptop space
>> power is a big concern. Time to market may have been a thing too, but
>> I don't recall all the specifics. I'll get to it later in the
>> response, but there are temporal components to decisions and/or how
>> things change over time that are not within Google's control when
>> working on a particular platform.
>>
>>>
>>> For Intel:
>>> It's hard for me to understand what parts of your silicon init you can
>>> open-source and what parts you can't. I know your BIOS Writer's Guides
>>> (BWG) / BIOS Spec, and many things therein are often published by you
>>> or Google. Please tell us.
>>>   o Are the things that you can *not* open-source documented at all?
>>>   o if so, in these BWG documents?
>>>   o Or is everything in these documents generally publishable (with
>>>     some NDA clearance, ofc)?
>>>   o For a configuration of FSP-S that just runs the bare minimum to
>>>     boot (e.g. skips questionable add-ons like TXT, SGX), is there
>>>     anything not publishable?
>>>   o Can anything be done to get more documentation published? e.g.
>>>     for things that are done in open source (or were done in the past)
>>>     but are not publicly documented.
>>
>> Based on my working history a lot of BWGs and/or specs are usually
>> wrong. They don't always contain the right information, but generally
>> contain quite a few things that are wrong where you second guess
>> everything in the docs. This should sound familiar: the 'reference
>> code' is the documentation. Most docs are not in sync with reality or
>> necessarily with how the silicon was actually designed. It's my belief
>> when there wasn't as much change from version to version, the
>> copy-pasting in docs just kinda worked. But as things have been
>> getting more complicated and incorporating more 'features' the
>> documentation has not been keeping up.
>
> Still these documents exist. And I deem them most valuable. I know there
> are flaws that can drive you crazy. But! they give a very good overview
> about what has to happen for silicon init. If published (for my sake w/o
> the secret ingredient bits) [2], they would be a great reference for
> discussions about the design of clean silicon-init code. We could har-
> ness the power of the community much better.
>
> It doesn't matter if somebody with access to the reference code has to
> fix some bugs later, once you have a decent maintainable code base.
> Neither would a blob that hides the secret ingredients if it only con-
> tains those (and no infrastructure / control flow; I think you, Aaron,
> and me share the same opinion on that).
>
>>
>>>
>>>
>>> So why ask? The original introduction of blobs in coreboot in general
>>> happened with the argument that the things it does (e.g. memory init)
>>> are not documented anymore by Intel. This is a valid argument because
>>> the lack of documentation makes it harder to write clean code. I also
>>> believe it's true (that no documentation exists) because I've seen a
>>> previous BWG that already referred a lot to the reference code.
>>>
>>> But, AFAIR, the introduction of blobs in coreboot's *ramstage* was never
>>> discussed. The blobs I've seen so far all did things that were already
>>> open source for earlier platforms. Plus they are twisting coreboot into
>>> something that isn't coreboot anymore. Architectural changes happen in
>>> chipset specific code instead of moving coreboot as a whole (after an
>>> open discussion). Also, most of the positive aspects about coreboot are
>>> lost.
>>
>> Purely business commentary: In order to develop a competitive laptop
>> on recent hardware one needs to include the features that consumers
>> expect. Intel also ties those features inside of FSP, but FSP has a
>> responsibility problem. It has traditionally attempted to do things it
>> should not. FSP should be a library of sorts, but it has things in
>> there it shouldn't. I mentioned some of this on the CL itself about
>> our usage of SkipMpInit. It trying to take over resources that it
>> shouldn't (among other things).
>>
>> What architectural changes are you referring to? And what is your
>
> You've got me there. I meant architectural things, not changes. Like
> that patch on gerrit. It doesn't seem to be Intel specific, I also
> can't find any soc_ reference in it. Yet, it's pushed to soc/intel/
> and to me that looks like somebody wants to sneak it it (without big
> discussion / being thought through for all of coreboot).
>
>> definition of coreboot (I know see you wrote it below :)? early
>> firmware that will initialize everything in open source for Intel
>> platforms? I wish that were the case, but it's not something that is
>> allowed by Intel currently. I'd love to see more granularity in FSP,
>> but as noted in the CL commentary Intel hasn't been accepting of my
>> suggestions for making things more granular such that one could do the
>> only things that are deemed 'super secret' by Intel. The muddling of
>> responsibility and lack of granularity are the current result.
>>
>>>
>>> Of course, it's hard to argument about whether something is coreboot
>>> or not without a clear definition of coreboot. But let me get this
>>> one straight: It's definitely not coreboot just because it happens on
>>> coreboot.org.
>>>
>>> I'll try to sum up what is coreboot to me, and compare that to a current
>>> coreboot with FSP. coreboot
>>>
>>>   1. is free software
>>>   2. is open source
>>>   3. is auditable
>>>   4. is lean (less code means less bugs)
>>>   5. gives control to the user
>>>
>>> but with FSP:
>>>
>>>   1. You can not fully adapt it, you can't even just download it (often
>>>      have to steal the FSP binary):
>>>      0%
>>>   2. Comparing the sizes of open-source parts and FSP, maybe 30%. But
>>>      if you don't count open-source code that is only needed to handle
>>>      blob issues, rather
>>>      20%
>>
>> Is this 20-30% coreboot/open source of the total?  Were you counting
>> the edk2 stuff in there? A lot of the bloat in FSP comes from open
>> source edk2.
>
> You can't count EDK2 into it. Once it's built into FSP, it's not open-
> source any more (unless somebody proves what parts match a reproducible
> compilation of the open-source code). And for an open-source experience
> you'd still need means to adapt these EDK2 parts in the binary. It was
> just a wild guess based on my experience with Kaby Lake FSP (~500KiB),
> and guessed 200KiB coreboot.
>
>>
>>>   3. If you are backed by a huge company or government, you can audit
>>>      coreboot+FSP (I guess), if not than not, 50%? But given that the
>>>      size of the whole package is about 10 times the size of a clean
>>>      implementation, you have to audit 10 times more code (of much
>>>      poorer quality), thus at most
>>>      5%
>>>   4. 0% (see above)
>>>   5. That seems to be my only point that Intel cares about. Still,
>>>      coreboot compatible binaries are often not available. You need
>>>      very weird workarounds if the one setting you miss is not there:
>>>      50%
>>>
>>> Numbers are just educated guesses, but might match reality. If you
>>> average these, you'll see that coreboot+FSP is only 15% of (my)
>>> coreboot. I would estimate that you can get up to 20% with the
>>> design of FPS2.0.
>>
>> I agree with the overall assessment above. As currently
>> deployed/supported FSP is not really geared to people who don't have a
>> more intimate relationship with Intel. It's been brought up numerous
>> times, but it's Intel's decision to make a better product.
>
> Right, quality of their products is up to them. But isn't it our re-
> sponsibility to decide whether they can do that (15%) in the name of
> coreboot?
>
> Nico
>
> [2] Assuming that the BWGs don't contain the secret ingredients, even
>     an NDA offer to all coreboot developer's (both hired ones and indi-
>     viduals) could help. If Intel allows to derive open-source code from
>     it (e.g. after a private review on gerrit) people would have less
>     doubts about signing an NDA, IMHO. Just a random thought; anything I
>     can come up with atm seems to be better than the status quo.
>
>>>
>>> So it's time for an FSP3.0 that was designed with the community,
>>> I'd say.
>>>
>>> Best regards,
>>> Nico
>>>
>>> [1] https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__review.coreboot.org_-23_c_coreboot_-2B_25634_&d=DwICAg&c=5VD0RTtNlTh3ycd41b3MUw&r=CFWWReJabtqA8oU7yaBHbIE9YvsZmeYWXWpJOiuGyNM&m=3wwXcqkQtroFB_kT3W-a0IFzj6sYZDqT1C8O9vYVP80&s=_TJ-Ft6l7FJJmJ1VJ-GJJfSzItat6lK0i15bv5BNSl0&e=
>
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