ron minnich wrote:
Given that the platforms work, and most of them are obsolete, it's hard to see the virtue in this change.
I disagree.
It adds the risk of failure for what seems an academic gain in cleanliness.
Code reuse where reuse makes sense is one of several things that separate coreboot from commercial firmware products, and a very worthy goal indeed.
Emphasis on makes sense, as always. Ron, I'm surprised that you are arguing against cleaning up code while at the same time saying that the code is too old to care about.
If there are almost 20 copies of identical code then that is merely silly copypasting which we should be happy that Paul wants to clean up.
As Aaron mentioned it might be one level too deep to unify the TSC code right now, but perhaps there can be some successful unification of some of the copies, and/or compile-time parameterization of the code such that there is less copies of the same code needed, if only some parameters change.
It's certainly worth looking into further, with an open mind.
//Peter
On Wed, May 8, 2013 at 1:43 PM, Peter Stuge peter@stuge.se wrote:
ron minnich wrote:
Given that the platforms work, and most of them are obsolete, it's hard to see the virtue in this change.
I disagree.
Are you going to test every one of the 19 platforms that we're talking about changing? Code sharing is wonderful, but if you change something this crucial you really need a way to test it. I've seen two proposals from paul today and both proposals had subtle errors. I've been in the situation of fixing firmware source that was "improved" 2 years after the fact and it's not that much fun.
So sure, it's great to reduce code size and unify things. But you'd better have a way to test it. And if you can't test it, you need to think hard about what you're doing.
Code reuse where reuse makes sense is one of several things that separate coreboot from commercial firmware products, and a very worthy goal indeed.
Well, yes, and I had something to do with that, you may recall :-)
I'm not arguing against reuse. But there are ways and there are ways.
One way is to unify new platforms going forward, and not touch old ones that can't be tested.
But I've had people break things before while 'cleaning it up' and it's not fun. The hardware bugs you deal with in firmware are far, far harder to work out than the stuff you run into at the kernel level, and it's best to keep that in mind.
ron
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Peter Stuge -
ron minnich