April 10 and April 24 coreboot leadership meeting minutes - coreboot

26 Apr 2019


      ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
24 April 2019 meeting minutes
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Attendees: StefanR, WernerZ, PatrickG, MartinR, MattD, Dhendricks,
FelixH, PhilippD, Jay Trivedi, Aheymans
Topics:
Martin’s been very busy with personal issues and hasn’t gotten to the items
from last meeting
  * Will publish last meeting’s minutes with today’s.  (These are below)
Finding a leadership group replacement for Marc
  - Email to the mailing list asking for nominations drafted and reviewed
(Now sent)
GSoC
  * (GSoC guidelines prevent posting discussions)
  * Schedule:
    - April 24 - May 1 18:00 UTC: Org Admins select the proposals to become
student projects. At least 1 mentor must be assigned to each project before
it can be selected. (Org Admins enter selections)
    - May 1-5: Google Program Admins will do another review of
student eligibility
    - May 6: Accepted GSoC 2019 students/projects are announced
Voting in the community
 * Martin has not yet written up the questions but will write up
the questions in the next week and we can discuss them in the next meeting
 * Topics include
    - How to handle copyrights
    - Line length
    - Automatic code formatting
The 4.10 release is scheduled for the end of April
 * Patrick will start the process.
 * Martin will start work on the document for release notes.
 * Arthur proposed a few requirements for boards to remain on the master
branch on the mailing list for the 4.11 release - will include these
requirements in the 4.10 release notes
    - All boards/chipsets need to use Relocatable ramstage
    - All boards using Cache-As-Ram would need a postcar stage
    - All boards need C env bootblock (Maybe move this to 4.12)
    - Deprecate 1.0 FSP in 4.12 - maybe maintain it on a branch
      - No new FSP 1.0 boards will be allowed in the tree after the 4.10
release
      - Intel should decide how they want to handle this
        ~ Note that a new Broadwell-DE chip was just released
      - The three chips still using FSP 1.0 are
        ~ Baytrail E38xx embedded SoC
        ~ Broadwell DE Xeon SoC
        ~ Rangeley C2000 SoC
 * If we're looking to maintain platforms on branches, we have an issue
that branches aren't tested.
    - Patrick will work to set up builders for branches
Martin just pushed initial patches for picasso (AMD Zen based processor)
 * Martin will write some documentation and get it released
How does the coreboot project want to spend the money we’ve collected?
 * Request: Hire someone to update the website.
   - Come up with a list of what we’d like to see improved.
   - Martin will send out an email to the mailing list.
 * Request: Look at hiring a tech writer to help with documentation?
   - There’s a fear that they wouldn’t be able to do anything
useful because of a lack of knowledge
   - Maybe hire someone from within the coreboot community to write the
documentation?
 * Request: Test setup on real hardware?
   - We need a plan on how to implement this.
   - The amount we’d be willing to spend per month depends on what we get.
     - We'd be looking at an upfront portion (cost of board + setup fee)
then a fee for ongoing maintenance.
   - How frequently are we looking at having the boards tested?
     - Every 4 hours / 1 day / every commit?
   - There’s worry about long-term sustainability of testing.
   - Just test a few key platforms
Can we look at running another round of compile tests before the commit
merge goes through?  The build has gotten broken several times recently due
to conflicts between merges that weren’t noticed in testing or by merging
commits out of order.
 * Gerrit doesn’t support this very well.
 * Can we do something similar to ChromeOS and close the tree when
the coreboot breaks so nothing else gets merged on top?
   - This would be a significant amount of work as well
 * Is it worth the pain if it’s only once or twice a month?
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
10 April 2019 meeting minutes
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Attendees: FelixH, PhilippD, StefanR, MartinR, PatrickG, ArthurH
Topics:
* Martin tried to set up livestream, but it’s internal only.  We’ll
try again for next time.
* Finding a leadership group replacement for Marc
  - Do we want to open nominations? (yes)
  - Martin will send out email to list.  (sent)
* Should we go for a copyright “The coreboot authors” with an AUTHORS file?
  - We're getting copyright lines for trivial changes and code deletions
  - Proposed on IRC, so far 2 “+1”s, no objections
  - Werner needs to ask in company about what they think about an AUTHORS
file (Still working on following up with this)
  - Ron mentions issues they had with copyright notices in Harvey project,
encourages use of AUTHORS
  - Should we just create a guideline of what’s copyrightable?
  - Martin has been encouraging people to contribute code so they can add
copyright headers heighten their profile in the community
    - Philipp proposes other means of raising profile:
maintainership, marketing (eg. talking about your work on twitter, getting
re-tweeted by coreboot_org)
 Decision:
  - Martin to research and create guidelines on what’s necessary for
“copyright”
  - Start an AUTHORS file
  - Ask the community about moving copyright lines from individual files to
AUTHORS for consistency
  - Create a script to generate the initial Authors file
* Who is the voting population for coreboot?
  Martin researched commits & reviews over the past 2 years and came up
with these statistics
 - Looking at just committers for the past 2 years:
    - cutoff 20 commits: 70 voters
    - cutoff 10 commits: 105 voters
 - Including committers & Reviewers in the past 2 years:
   - cutoff 20 commits or 20 reviews: 77 voters
   - cutoff 10 commits or 10 reviews: 117 voters
 - Looking at just commiters from the past 1 year:
   - cutoff 20 commits: 43 voters
   - cutoff 10 commits: 77 voters
 - Including committers & Reviewers in the past 1 year:
   - cutoff 20 commits or 20 reviews: 54 voters
   - cutoff 10 commits or 10 reviews: 90 voters
Decision:
  - Go with the widest distribution: 10 commits or reviews in the past 2
years
  - Martin has generated the list
* GSoC applications are in
  - (GSoC guidelines prevent posting discussion)
* Community events:
  - Hackathon in June: 3 tickets still open, so get yours fast
  - OSFC 2019: CFP is out, registration open next week
    - Philipp will send invites directly to previous presenters and
people on coreboot contractors list.
    - OSFC needs people on the program committee to review proposals
* Voting in the community:
  - Ranked voting using https://civs.cs.cornell.edu
  - Martin will create a list of questions:
  - Line length question: 80, 88, 96, 120, 132, unlimited characters
  - clang-format or not?