Dear Stefan, dear coreboot folks,
Am Donnerstag, den 20.03.2014, 22:55 +0100 schrieb Stefan Reinauer:
Changes to the coreboot Project Structure
We -- the coreboot project -- have succeeded beyond our wildest expectations, with every major laptop vendor using our code. Going forward, this will require a few structural changes that will ensure that the vendors shipping coreboot products can count on a stable, reliable code base.
With that incredible success, there is also a lot of work to be done to make sure the project is scaling and keeping up with the requirements of the millions of new users that coreboot gets every year.
[…]
While there is a fairly good understanding of the project direction and interest between those individual contributors, […]
reading these lines I realized I do not have that understanding and I am not so certain anymore about the expectations, coreboot’s directions and the interest.
First I find “wildest expectations” a little exaggerated seeing the blobs (especially ME) shipped in all current Intel devices [1]. It is even worse that these blobs are not allowed to be distributed making building and flashing an image more difficult.
Additionally I heard claims, that the GPLv2 license is violated as it is currently impossible to rebuild the exact same image that is shipped with the devices as it is not even clear what commit was used to build the image and to my knowledge the requests on the list and in the IRC channel were not answered.
I suspect that in the beginning of coreboot even Ron and you would not have expected anything like this to happen and not considered that such an image meets your expectations.
So I congratulate that coreboot is used by several vendors and has millions of users, but it is to be taken with a grain of salt. It is also clear, that you do not like this situation either, but it would be interesting what the expectation and direction should be.
Clearly, getting a system to boot is not the main goal as everybody can do that with the vendor BIOS/UEFI, which, by the way, lately greatly improved boot time too in my experience.
For Google and the laptop vendors, I guess the goal is simply to save the money per device that traditionally went to the BIOS/UEFI vendors. Of course the payload concept gives a lot of flexibility, which is nice too. But in the end it seems to come down to saving money and hoping to make more profit. I do not know, if that worked and works out and how much more time it costs to deal with the community and reviews compared to the interaction with the BIOS/UEFI vendors and paying the fee/tax or with the time to deal with Intel’s management engine.
The other sad development seems to be that AMD, until now being the company most supportive of coreboot by contributing code and employing developers – unfortunately only in the embedded section – working on coreboot, even *thinks* about only providing binary blobs of AGESA instead of (IP scrubbed) sources for AGESA. Unfortunately they do not seem to get the advantages of free software and understand free software in their AGESA department and although being of much smaller size than Intel, they seem already big enough to not being able to change or only being able to change slowly.
And the possible move to blobs is also kind of understandable, as despite being such a first class citizen, seeing that Intel (i945) gets chosen by the German government and Google chooses Intel for their Chromebooks and ships images with blobs. As Intel is bigger, Google probably hired more people from Intel than from AMD. Maybe the Google decision makers know the Intel decision makers and play Golf with each other. Anyway, it is another datapoint that it is not about free software at all.
So one could even say, that coreboot’s decision to allow binary blobs as the Management Engine and RAM init (MRC) even supported AMD’s current *plans* to go back to binary blobs as it is currently allowed for Intel. So it is questionable if the past decisions served the project well. I have no clue what would have been better and if this could have been avoided at all. Nobody can look into the future. So we have to take it as it is now, but it is clear that the opponents back then had valid points and that such decisions can have negative long term side effects.
It should also not be forgotten that thanks to the leaks from Edward Snowden, the current political and economic(?) situation is as good as never before for free software and coreboot. In the Internet business, companies in the USA already feel the consequences and loose contracts and money when their datacenters/servers are located in the USA.
The same will hopefully happen to hardware vendors shipping proprietary BIOS/UEFI firmware. AMD is currently the only feasible (x86) vendor and hopefully policies are going to be implemented only allowing government agencies to by AMD stuff with free firmware. (No idea how much the IT personal is educated and who is in charge for these decisions and if one can sue/request such policies, like the tax agency has to use AMD hardware with coreboot to adhere to privacy concerns.)
So there is hope and a chance for coreboot to get rid of these blobs once and for all.
So what are the expectations for the next years? What directions should coreboot go? I am interested in your views. Especially from the benevolent dictator and other old term contributors.
In my opinion, we should get the first AMD laptop supported as soon as possible as currently only Intel laptops are supported, so there is an option on the market government, people and companies can buy if they are interested. In the IRC channel #coreboot on <irc.freenode.net> [2] such things are discussed already and there might be even volunteers. This should be discussed in a separate thread though.
Thanks,
Paul
[1] http://www.coreboot.org/Binary_situation [2] http://www.coreboot.org/IRC