coreboot ported to the ASUS KGPE-D16 (Libreboot: blobless, fully functional!)

[Timothy Pearson]

All,

I have successfully ported coreboot to the relatively modern ASUS 
KGPE-D16 server board (dual AMD socket G34, 16 DDR3 DIMMs, 
https://www.asus.com/us/Commercial_Servers_Workstations/KGPED16/)!  This 
port uses native Family 10h initialization (_not_ AGESA or CIMX).

The Libreboot folks will be interested to know that this board can run 
blob-free and still retain full functionality!

Port specifications:
CPU: Dual AMD G34 Magny-Cours (Family 10h)
RAM: 16 DDR3 DIMM slots with ECC support (tested with x4 4G DDR3-1333 
unbuffered DIMMs)

Peripherals:
PCIe slots: all functional
PCI slot: functional
RS-232: functional
PS/2: expected to function, not tested (on SuperIO)
ASpeed VGA device: functional (text mode, see below)
IEEE1394: functional
On-board USB: functional
On-board NICs: functional
ASUS PIKE SAS controller: functional
PCIe ROMs: functional

Power management:
DDR3 voltage set: functional
ACPI/APIC: functional
Suspend/resume: broken

Other:
cbmem console: partial support (log truncated)
cbmem timestamps: functional
nvram: functional
BIOS recovery jumper: functional

ASpeed VGA:
The ASpeed VGA device initialises in text mode via its (new) coreboot 
driver, however this initialisation is incomplete, leading to distorted 
but quite usable VGA output.  When Linux boots and engages the graphical 
framebuffer all distortion disappears.

This port was not trivial.  Almost every device used was broken and 
required debugging/repair, with the notable exception of the SuperIO 
chip.  The AMD DDR3 controller was severely broken to the point where 
large rewrites were needed in order to bring it in line with the BKDG. 
Even after the various component drivers were repaired

Due to the labor-intensive nature of the port and the extensive changes 
throughout the entire source tree, it is not economically feasible to 
merge this port upstream at this time (I estimate upward of 30 
independent patches would be required just to get the board booting!). 
Raptor Engineering will, however, be continuing to maintain this port 
internally, and I am currently looking into adding native Family 15h 
support on top of this internal tree.  Additionally, while it was not a 
priority for the initial port, I will be attempting to enable 
suspend/resume functionality as I have time.

If there is sufficient interest from the community in adding this board 
to coreboot I would consider merging the changes in exchange for a 
one-time contract payment in the vicinity of $35,000 USD.  When 
considering this offer please bear in mind that this is a fully 
functional blobless board with a wide range of peripherals and expansion 
options available, and that once these large changes are merged I will 
continue to enhance coreboot functionality as before (e.g. with the 
KFSN4-DRE and the T400).  I would also be willing to add this board to 
the test stand as the only fully supported 4-way Opteron board (socket 
G34 Magny-Cours CPUs contain two separate CPUs in one package, making 
this 2-socket board a 4-way system from a HyperTransport perspective).

Please let me know if you have any questions!

-- 
Timothy Pearson
Raptor Engineering
[phone]
http://www.raptorengineeringinc.com

[The Gluglug]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
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You should crowd-fund the $35,000 figure, there are lots of people who
will be interested in this. I personally will chip in, and I'd ask
others to as well.
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[The Gluglug]

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On 29/04/15 22:46, The Gluglug wrote:
  You should crowd-fund the $35,000 figure, there are
lots of people
 who will be interested in this. I personally will chip in, and I'd
 ask others to as well.
What about simply pushing the code as-is (make your non-upstream tree
publicly available for people to git-clone), and let the community
upstream it in their own time?
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[Timothy Pearson]

On 04/29/2015 04:56 PM, The Gluglug wrote:
 
 What about simply pushing the code as-is (make your non-upstream tree
 publicly available for people to git-clone), and let the community
 upstream it in their own time?
There is no real incentive for Raptor to do this.  There is no guarantee 
of code actually being up-streamed and maintained by the community, but 
after this release our competitors may use the code at will.

To be clear, we use coreboot internally on a large server cluster.  This 
port is the result of an internal effort to upgrade said cluster, and 
while it is in our financial interest to upstream ports of older boards 
(e.g. the ASUS KFSN4-DRE) that did not require changes to the underlying 
support code, it is _not_ in our financial interest to simply release 
the code to modern boards that required major changes to underlying 
support code.

-- 
Timothy Pearson
Raptor Engineering
[phone]
http://www.raptorengineeringinc.com

[Ward Vandewege]

On Wed, Apr 29, 2015 at 10:46:29PM +0100, The Gluglug wrote:
  You should crowd-fund the $35,000 figure, there are
lots of people who
 will be interested in this. I personally will chip in, and I'd ask
 others to as well.
I would chip in too.

Thanks,
Ward.

-- 
Ward Vandewege
GPG Key: 25F774AB

Do you use free software? Donate to join the FSF and support freedom at
         http://www.fsf.org/register_form?referrer=859

[Emilian Bold]

I'm curious, is there some Coreboot Foundation that would gather this money
and purchase the copyright or would Raptor just somehow crowd-fund this
money to license their work as GPLv2 while keeping the copyright?

--emi


On Thu, Apr 30, 2015 at 4:54 AM, Ward Vandewege <ward(a)gnu.org> wrote:

  On Wed, Apr 29, 2015 at 10:46:29PM +0100, The Gluglug
wrote:
  You should crowd-fund the $35,000 figure, there
are lots of people who
 will be interested in this. I personally will chip in, and I'd ask
 others to as well.
 I would chip in too.

 Thanks,
 Ward.

 --
 Ward Vandewege
 GPG Key: 25F774AB

 Do you use free software? Donate to join the FSF and support freedom at
          http://www.fsf.org/register_form?referrer=859

 --
 coreboot mailing list: coreboot(a)coreboot.org
 http://www.coreboot.org/mailman/listinfo/coreboot

[RFC] Preparing a crowdfunding campaign for the ASUS KGPE-D16 (was: coreboot ported to the ASUS KGPE-D16)

[Paul Menzel]

Dear coreboot folks,


Timothy, congratulations again on making a coreboot port for the ASUS
KGPE-D16 and therefore completing your third coreboot port! That’s
really amazing!


Am Mittwoch, den 29.04.2015, 22:46 +0100 schrieb The Gluglug:
  You should crowd-fund the $35,000 figure, there are
lots of people who
 will be interested in this. I personally will chip in, and I'd ask
 others to as well.
I am thinking about organizing the crowdfunding campaign to raise the
money.

If somebody else wants to do it, please speak up!

As this is more or less a donation by the backers, the process should be
as open and transparent as possible. That’s why I am sharing the
following information publicly.

1. Giant Monkey Software Engineering [1], the German company I work for,
would be the organizing entity. As a company with five employees and a
GmbH it might have enough credibility so that people would pledge/give
their money to Giant Monkey compared to a private person or company run
by a single person. Giant Monkey also has some PR/campaign knowledge,
but most importantly knows a lot of people in the marketing sector.

2. After receiving the money, Giant Monkey would contract Raptor
Engineering.

3. I’d like to have the domain campaign.coreboot.org redirect to the
campaign page at the crowdfunding platform or set up a simple Web site
there.

4. git-annex’ second funding was done by itself with PayPal. That saves
the 4 % fee most other crowdfunding platforms charge.

Using a crowdfunding platform might be easier though, as they have
experience and also provide a big community of possible backers.

Currently I’m thinking about Indiegogo, which Jolla also used to fund
the Jolla Tablet. I heard, Kickstarter is also great with a big network.

5. I plan to raise 100.000 € (around $110.000) to upstream, that
includes *paid review* and running the campaign, the whole port. (I’ll
continue to use Euros.) More money would be used for stretch goals.

α)  4.000 € Indiegogo fees
β) 35.000 € for Raptor Engineering for upstreaming for basic port
γ) 15.000 € for Raptor Engineering for implementing support for S2R (S3)
δ) 10.000 € for code review (inclusively hardware) (just an estimate)
ε)  2.000 € for Gluglug to release images (I have not talked to Francis
yet.)
φ) 10.000 € campaign goodies (cf. 7.)
ι)  4.000 € taxes (probably a lot more, depends if given money counts as
donation)
μ) 20.000 € Giant Monkey for running the campaign (Web site, press,
marketing, videos, mile stone tasks (see below), …)

(Stretch goal)
ν) 15.000 € for Raptor Engineering for upstreaming Family 15h support
for the board

6. I’d start with a minimal Web site and campaign platform page and see
how big the momentum alone through the coreboot community is. If we get
10.000 € in a week, I’d fully step in with a professional campaign.
Otherwise I’d stop the campaign.

7. As a thank you for backers, I think of a payload included in the
distributed coreboot based firmware image, reading a text file from CBFS
with the names of the backers and displaying it. (Or a simple splash
screen.) Of course just for those wanting it. Big backers (25.000 €) get
a board with one CPU and RAM and coreboot preinstalled; medium backers
(10.000 €) get some BLOB free laptop for example (Rockchip Chromebook or
some Lenovo board). flash ROM chips are sent to backers donating 25 €.

8. Milestone tasks: At certain mile stones (probably each 10.000 €), I’d
promise some more tasks to improve coreboot or the port (see the 5.000 €
steps in the top). Possible are also SSL certificates for coreboot
infrastructure, promising to run a 32-bit userspace build host,
redesigning the Web site, implementing CBMEM time stamp support in
SeaBIOS and GRUB, supporting Google’s verified boot, ….

9. Reasons for contributing

α) server, cluster companies; administrators
   Do hosting/server companies besides coreinfo [5] with AMD based
offers exist? That means, is there a chance of getting big
contributions?

   What about the Free Software Foundation (FSF), FSF Europe (FSFE),
Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)? What about governments?

β) free software enthusiasts
   I hope with the FSF, FSFE and EFF some big organizations will be able
to motivate a lot of people to donate.
γ) private “normal” people
   This is my main problem. Alexandru Gagniuc uses(?)/used(?) the board
as a workstation, but the normal user will never use that expensive
server board at home. Therefore they will never hold it in their hands.
In the end the given money is a donation. Therefore, we need good
arguments that Jane User will participate.

I have the bad feeling, that most of them won’t donate, as they do not
see the benefit as coreboot is hard to explain. This is the biggest risk
for the campaign. To get those a lot of money needs to be invested in
marketing and promotion. But will the additional donations cover those
costs and add to the original goal to support upstreaming the board?

In the end, coreboot developers should get paid for their work. The
Varnish Cache developer has a good write-up about this issue [7].

  But software is written by people, real people with
kids, cars,
 mortgages, leaky roofs, sick pets, infirm parents and all other kinds
 of perfectly normal worries of an adult human being.

 The best way to improve the quality of Free and Open Source Software,
 is to make it possible for these people to spend time on it.

 They need time to review submissions carefully, time to write and run
 test-cases, time to respond and fix to bug-reports, time to code and
 most of all, time to think about the code.

 But it would not even be close to morally defensible to ask these
 people to forego time to play with their kids, so that they instead
 develop and maintain the software that drives other peoples companies.

 The right way to go -- the moral way to go -- and by far the most
 productive way to go, is to pay the developers so they can make the
 software they love their living.

Questions
=========
1. Recently Roundcube, the most(?) popular Webmail client, which is much
more known than coreboot, started a crowdfunding campaign for $80.000
[6]. In the last two weeks they raised around $25.000. But experience
shows that only in the beginning and in the end of a campaign a lot of
money is collected.

So, what do you think? Is the coreboot crowdfunding campaign even
realistic?

2. What crowdfunding platform should be used? Does Indiegogo [3] work
for everyone? Are there platforms which will get boycotted by free
software enthusiasts?


Thank you for reading up to this point. I am looking forward to your
comments.


Thanks,

Paul


[1] https://www.giantmonkey.de
[2] https://campaign.joeyh.name
[3] https://www.indiegogo.com
[4] https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/jolla-tablet-world-s-first-crowdsourced-…
[5] http://coreinfo.us
[6] https://roundcu.be/next
[7] https://www.varnish-cache.org/docs/4.0/phk/dough.html

[RFC] Preparing a crowdfunding campaign for the ASUS KGPE-D16

[The Gluglug]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1



On 17/05/15 15:11, Paul Menzel wrote:
  Dear coreboot folks,
 
 
 Timothy, congratulations again on making a coreboot port for the
 ASUS KGPE-D16 and therefore completing your third coreboot port!
 That’s really amazing!
 
 
 Am Mittwoch, den 29.04.2015, 22:46 +0100 schrieb The Gluglug:
  You should crowd-fund the $35,000 figure, there
are lots of
 people who will be interested in this. I personally will chip in,
 and I'd ask others to as well.
 
 I am thinking about organizing the crowdfunding campaign to raise
 the money.
 
 If somebody else wants to do it, please speak up!
 
 As this is more or less a donation by the backers, the process
 should be as open and transparent as possible. That’s why I am
 sharing the following information publicly.
 
 1. Giant Monkey Software Engineering [1], the German company I work
 for, would be the organizing entity. As a company with five
 employees and a GmbH it might have enough credibility so that
 people would pledge/give their money to Giant Monkey compared to a
 private person or company run by a single person. Giant Monkey also
 has some PR/campaign knowledge, but most importantly knows a lot of
 people in the marketing sector.
 
 2. After receiving the money, Giant Monkey would contract Raptor 
 Engineering.
 
 3. I’d like to have the domain campaign.coreboot.org redirect to
 the campaign page at the crowdfunding platform or set up a simple
 Web site there.
 
 4. git-annex’ second funding was done by itself with PayPal. That
 saves the 4 % fee most other crowdfunding platforms charge.
 
 Using a crowdfunding platform might be easier though, as they have 
 experience and also provide a big community of possible backers.
 
 Currently I’m thinking about Indiegogo, which Jolla also used to
 fund the Jolla Tablet. I heard, Kickstarter is also great with a
 big network.
 
 5. I plan to raise 100.000 € (around $110.000) to upstream, that 
 includes *paid review* and running the campaign, the whole port.
 (I’ll continue to use Euros.) More money would be used for stretch
 goals.
 
 ?)  4.000 € Indiegogo fees ?) 35.000 € for Raptor Engineering for
 upstreaming for basic port ?) 15.000 € for Raptor Engineering for
 implementing support for S2R (S3) ?) 10.000 € for code review
 (inclusively hardware) (just an estimate) ?)  2.000 € for Gluglug
 to release images (I have not talked to Francis yet.) ?) 10.000 €
 campaign goodies (cf. 7.) ?)  4.000 € taxes (probably a lot more,
 depends if given money counts as donation) ?) 20.000 € Giant Monkey
 for running the campaign (Web site, press, marketing, videos, mile
 stone tasks (see below), …)
 
 (Stretch goal) ?) 15.000 € for Raptor Engineering for upstreaming
 Family 15h support for the board
 
 6. I’d start with a minimal Web site and campaign platform page and
 see how big the momentum alone through the coreboot community is.
 If we get 10.000 € in a week, I’d fully step in with a professional
 campaign. Otherwise I’d stop the campaign.
 
 7. As a thank you for backers, I think of a payload included in
 the distributed coreboot based firmware image, reading a text file
 from CBFS with the names of the backers and displaying it. (Or a
 simple splash screen.) Of course just for those wanting it. Big
 backers (25.000 €) get a board with one CPU and RAM and coreboot
 preinstalled; medium backers (10.000 €) get some BLOB free laptop
 for example (Rockchip Chromebook or some Lenovo board). flash ROM
 chips are sent to backers donating 25 €.
 
 8. Milestone tasks: At certain mile stones (probably each 10.000
 €), I’d promise some more tasks to improve coreboot or the port
 (see the 5.000 € steps in the top). Possible are also SSL
 certificates for coreboot infrastructure, promising to run a 32-bit
 userspace build host, redesigning the Web site, implementing CBMEM
 time stamp support in SeaBIOS and GRUB, supporting Google’s
 verified boot, ….
 
 9. Reasons for contributing
 
 ?) server, cluster companies; administrators Do hosting/server
 companies besides coreinfo [5] with AMD based offers exist? That
 means, is there a chance of getting big contributions?
 
 What about the Free Software Foundation (FSF), FSF Europe (FSFE), 
 Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)? What about governments?
 
 ?) free software enthusiasts I hope with the FSF, FSFE and EFF some
 big organizations will be able to motivate a lot of people to
 donate. ?) private “normal” people This is my main problem.
 Alexandru Gagniuc uses(?)/used(?) the board as a workstation, but
 the normal user will never use that expensive server board at home.
 Therefore they will never hold it in their hands. In the end the
 given money is a donation. Therefore, we need good arguments that
 Jane User will participate.
 
 I have the bad feeling, that most of them won’t donate, as they do
 not see the benefit as coreboot is hard to explain. This is the
 biggest risk for the campaign. To get those a lot of money needs to
 be invested in marketing and promotion. But will the additional
 donations cover those costs and add to the original goal to support
 upstreaming the board?
 
 In the end, coreboot developers should get paid for their work.
 The Varnish Cache developer has a good write-up about this issue
 [7].
 
  But software is written by people, real people
with kids, cars, 
 mortgages, leaky roofs, sick pets, infirm parents and all other
 kinds of perfectly normal worries of an adult human being.
 
 The best way to improve the quality of Free and Open Source
 Software, is to make it possible for these people to spend time
 on it.
 
 They need time to review submissions carefully, time to write and
 run test-cases, time to respond and fix to bug-reports, time to
 code and most of all, time to think about the code.
 
 But it would not even be close to morally defensible to ask
 these people to forego time to play with their kids, so that they
 instead develop and maintain the software that drives other
 peoples companies.
 
 The right way to go -- the moral way to go -- and by far the
 most productive way to go, is to pay the developers so they can
 make the software they love their living.
 
 
 Questions ========= 1. Recently Roundcube, the most(?) popular
 Webmail client, which is much more known than coreboot, started a
 crowdfunding campaign for $80.000 [6]. In the last two weeks they
 raised around $25.000. But experience shows that only in the
 beginning and in the end of a campaign a lot of money is
 collected.
 
 So, what do you think? Is the coreboot crowdfunding campaign even 
 realistic?
 
 2. What crowdfunding platform should be used? Does Indiegogo [3]
 work for everyone? Are there platforms which will get boycotted by
 free software enthusiasts?
 
 
 Thank you for reading up to this point. I am looking forward to
 your comments.
 
 
 Thanks,
 
 Paul
 
 
 [1] https://www.giantmonkey.de [2] https://campaign.joeyh.name [3]
 https://www.indiegogo.com [4]
 https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/jolla-tablet-world-s-first-crowdsourced-…

[5] http://coreinfo.us
  [6] https://roundcu.be/next [7]
 https://www.varnish-cache.org/docs/4.0/phk/dough.html
 
 

I think we should get the FSF to run a campaign for this. They can
keep the overheads low and keep the funding amount low. They are also
based in the same country as Raptor Engineering.
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[Timothy Pearson]

On 04/29/2015 04:30 PM, Timothy Pearson wrote:
  All,

 I have successfully ported coreboot to the relatively modern ASUS
 KGPE-D16 server board (dual AMD socket G34, 16 DDR3 DIMMs,
 https://www.asus.com/us/Commercial_Servers_Workstations/KGPED16/)! This
 port uses native Family 10h initialization (_not_ AGESA or CIMX).

 The Libreboot folks will be interested to know that this board can run
 blob-free and still retain full functionality!

 Port specifications:
 CPU: Dual AMD G34 Magny-Cours (Family 10h)
 RAM: 16 DDR3 DIMM slots with ECC support (tested with x4 4G DDR3-1333
 unbuffered DIMMs)
Just a quick update on this.  Work has continued internally, and as of 
this message the KGPE-D16 port has two additional options available: 
full S3 support and native (non-AGESA) support for Family 15h 
processors.  When all of the options are combined the KGPE-D16 is able 
to use the most modern Opterons available with no apparent issues; as a 
result, there should be very little development work remaining on this 
system.

The new Family 15h initialisation is integrated into the native Family 
10h codebase; the two processors are similar enough overall (though 
still quite different on a more local scale) that this was feasible. 
The memory controllers are quite different between the two processor 
families; much of the additional work was related to updating the 
processor-independent mct_ddr3 code to handle the modified MCT design 
and training procedures.  During this process the mct_ddr3 codebase has 
also been cleaned up significantly, and if the entire proposed patchset 
is merged the cleanup work will continue under Raptor's normal (free) 
open source development model.

Family 15h port specifications:
Opteron 6200 processors: tested, fully functional
Opteron 6300[P] processors: theoretically supported, not yet tested
Dual packages: theoretically supported, not yet tested

Unbuffered DDR3 DIMMs: tested, fully functional
Registered DDR3 DIMMs: theoretically supported, not yet tested
Load-Reduced DDR3 DIMMs: incomplete support [1]
Reduced DIMM voltage: tested, fully functional

ACPI object generation: tested, fully functional
PowerNow!: tested, fully functional
S3 suspend/resume: tested, fully functional

As mentioned before, this port was done for internal purposes to give 
Raptor Engineering a competitive advantage in certain markets.  However, 
Raptor Engineering is willing to upstream the code if funded.  The offer 
is currently broken up into three parts, with each part being dependent 
on the previous part:

1.) Full KGPE-D16 support as described in previous message, Family 10h 
only w/o S3: $35,000 USD

2.) Family 10h S3 support: $15,000 USD

3.) Native Family 15h support with S3 and MCT modifications: $40,000 USD

The port is broken up into these sections specifically so that the 
community can decide what is important enough to fund.  Ideally the 
entire patch set would be funded, but if the community does not have 
sufficient interest in the most current Opteron processors I don't want 
to block the potential upstreaming of the other two sections.

Items marked as "theoretically supported" above should work but have not 
been tested; if they do not function Raptor Engineering would fix any 
observed failures as part of the quoted costs.

Thank you for your consideration!

1. These are not generally relevant to the KGPE-D16 on a technical basis 
due to the design of the G34 socket, and even less so given the 
extremely high cost of LRDIMM modules.  However, if LRDIMM support is 
desired Raptor Engineering would be willing to add support as part of 
the quoted cost after the rest of the code is upstreamed.

-- 
Timothy Pearson
Raptor Engineering
[phone]
http://www.raptorengineeringinc.com

[Timothy Pearson]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

All,

Raptor Engineering is pleased to announce the public release of the ASUS
KGPE-D16 support code, including support for Family 15h processors!

The current feature status matrix and link to the patchsets on Gerrit is
available here:
https://raptorengineeringinc.com/coreboot/kgpe-d16-status.php

Raptor Engineering would also like to thank Minifree Ltd. for sponsoring
this release.  I know earlier it looked like the crowdfunding push had
died away, but we were working hard on a deal to get this code to the
general public as quickly as possible.  As such I couldn't say too much
on the topic until now.

To get the funding requirements down to a manageable level, Raptor
Engineering has split off several items that would normally have been
included with this upstreaming push.  Specifically, there is no blanket
warranty provided with the patchset as was originally intended --
instead, if an functionality issue is found, you are encouraged to
contract directly with Raptor Engineering to create a fix.  Also, some
of the features not directly related to our production operations here
are incomplete; for example, we are currently looking for sponsors to
sponsore the work needed to resolve certain RAM initialisation issues
and to port the OpenBMC firmware to these boards.

Thank you all for your interest in this port; I hope to hear from you
again in the future!

- -- 
Timothy Pearson
Raptor Engineering
[phone] (direct line)
[phone] (switchboard)
http://www.raptorengineeringinc.com
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coreboot ported to the ASUS KGPE-D16 (Libreboot: blobless, fully functional!)

[Peter Stuge]

Hi all,

Timothy Pearson wrote:
  Raptor Engineering is pleased to announce the public
release of the ASUS
 KGPE-D16 support code, including support for Family 15h processors!
..
  Raptor Engineering would also like to thank Minifree
Ltd. for sponsoring
 this release.
I would like to take this opportunity to also express my gratitude
and appreciation to Minifree Ltd. and Francis Rowe for enabling this
most excellent contribution to coreboot possible!

Thank you very much.

I have been quite critical of the Libreboot project, but I do
recognize that this contribution to coreboot would never have been
possible if it were not for Francis starting out on the Libreboot
adventure.

Well done! Keep them coming. :) Francis, now I owe you two beverages.


Have a great weekend

//Peter