Jordan Crouse wrote:
The main gain to the above is is that we can keep all the legacy x86 real mode crud (including option roms) in one place (seabios), and we can avoid having to return from seabios to coreboot and thus not have to worry abou them "stomping" on each other.
My main concern is that if seabios becomes a defacto mandatory payload for coreboot, then having two separate projects to put together will be an undue burden on the builders. My thinking has always been that at the time when something becomes essential to the operation of coreboot, it should be merged into coreboot.
I absolutely agree to the point you're making.
But I'd prefer to have a local copy (regularly synced) of seabios in the coreboot tree over having a second and third implementation of the same thing in our tree that people will be using instead of seabios.
It does not help seabios, and it does not help us. We included x86emu in a similar way, or flashrom via svn:external.
Right now it's a "Seabios: all or nothing" decision. That's bad. And as long as that's the case, I believe people will go nothing rather than all except in rare cases.