Hello,
As a GSoC candidate, I have been digging for some time within coreboot repos, building stuff, booting different OSes with different payloads and different tweaks, and so on. I have applied to two coreboot projects: 1) "Fully support building coreboot with the Clang compiler", 2) "Port GRUB2 to RISC-V".
As an ENS master student intending to pursue in the academic field, I chose : - coreboot organization because, very briefly, I believe in open hardware/firmware and am very interested in system development and computer security, especially in the intersection of both ; - these 2 possible projects because, again very briefly, I am highly interested since a few years in both the LLVM toolchain and the RISC-V architecture. I already worked on research projects related to all of this during research internships, and think of this GSoC as an opportunity to learn more while contributing to one of the open source projects I am the most interested in.
- Due to COVID-19 outbreak and corresponding countermeasures in France, I do not have access currently to all of the hardware normally at my disposal. Even if I have enough resources to work remotely in a reasonable manner, I try to optimize my setup, and think about using ccache (when useful) and distcc (when possible). Thankfully, I have access to some of my school resources that should allow me to work efficiently, a few mid-range workstations. The first topic would probably be more resource-intensive. I already have some experience with ccache. Do you have any additional advice? It could really be useful (and interesting)?
- I also tried to build coreboot toolchain targets on different Linux distributions, and I have some trouble on Arch Linux with the clang target. I managed to bisect it to an issue between gcc 9.2.0-4 and gcc 9.3.0-1. I did not find anything about this previously, is there something I am missing and I should be aware of, before I go further? Please find attached the error message, due to a narrowing conversion.
It is quite late to get in touch with the developers team, but I had to cope with issues related to COVID-19. I am very sorry about that, but now that it is done, I am ready for this GSoC.
Best regards, Antonin Reitz