On 20.03.2014 22:33, Stefan Reinauer wrote:
coreboot for the 21st century
setting up the project for the next decade
Purpose: Purge all boards / chipsets / cpus that require ROMCC in romstage and known broken chipsets (sc520, i855)
coreboot is now officially 15 years old. One and a half long decades with ups and downs. During this time we collected over 250 different mainboards. A great achievement, but also a great maintenance burden.
- It is hard to keep 250+ mainboards working. Actually impossible.
- Keeping them working comes at a cost. Keep old infrastructure around. Workarounds, special cases
- We don’t test except on the very last stuff we’re working on
The boards and chipsets are sufficiently well insulated from each other so that it's possible to improve one without breaking the others. With board-status the potential users and devs have a good overview which revisions work on which devices. The breakage will periodically occur no matter if it's 25 board or 250 boards. And it will be fixed by those who care about the particular board. Also I feel like the amount of boards supported is actually a relatively minor maintenance burden compared to number of *options* supported. I think we should first go on killing the options noone really uses like possibility disabling ACPI tables (I have a changeset for this, mixed reception), disabling SMBIOS tables. "relocatable" modules should be chosen by chipset, not be user-visible, and so on. There are more broken option configurations than broken boards.