Hi everybody,
It's high time we looked into cutting yet another release. As usual, other than our 6-monthly cadence of incrementing a number on our tree and pushing out tarballs and press releases, no particular rationale prompts this event. Unlike previous occasions, this is my first time executing the coreboot release process along with Patrick Georgi.
We plan to do the release on Wednesday, November 18. This announcement is in conformity with the process described on https://doc.coreboot.org/releases/checklist.html, as we're currently at the "~2 weeks prior to release" point.
For this reason, I would earnestly appreciate it if you (everyone subscribed to this list, but given that you're reading this mail, yes, you too!) could help out with the following:
1. Testing: the more, the better. Please test as much of your coreboot-supported hardware as you can, report and/or address any issues, and upload fresh reports to the board-status repo. Despite having no quality requirement to give a new number to our tree (create a new release), it is important to ensure what we have in the tree is still functional, since it lowers the work needed to pin-point new issues (bisections since 4.12 should still take 12 steps or less at this time, even though there's about 40% more commits than between the last two releases).
2. Please try to postpone riskier changes and similar until the release is done (unless they're ready to land in the next few days), in order to keep the tree stable while people test whether their hardware still works as expected. If a major feature doesn't make it into this release, don't worry; it can always be part of the following release. Let's make sure this coreboot release keeps booting.
3. Please take a look at the preliminary release notes in Documentation/releases/coreboot-4.13-relnotes.md and add whatever happened since 4.12 that is worth mentioning. If unsure, simply push a change to Gerrit and have your fellow developers discuss it.
Thanks, Angel Pons
Hi again,
About a week ago, I announced our plans to do a new coreboot release, which is scheduled to take place next Wednesday, November 18. This means we're currently at the "~1 week prior to release" point of our release checklist (at https://doc.coreboot.org/releases/checklist.html).
To this end, please test the devices you have with master, fix (or at least report) regressions you encounter, and propose additions to the release notes. Furthermore, I would earnestly appreciate that any risky changes be postponed until after the release is done, in order to minimize the impact of any possible breakage.
Owing to the lack of developers and testers for Denverton-NS, it has been proposed as a candidate for removal in a future release: https://review.coreboot.org/47539 If anyone is still interested in keeping this platform supported in the future, please consider becoming a maintainer or providing the means to boot-test its code. Personally, I believe the root of the problem is testing: most coreboot developers don't have access to a Denverton-NS system to boot-test any changes, so it's impossible to ensure changes won't accidentally break something.
Thanks, Angel
Hello again,
Given that there's still some activity going on regarding deprecations on the release notes, the release may be delayed one or two more days to let things settle down, but no more. I look into having the release done this week, but I'd also like to proceed without rushing as it's my first time doing a coreboot release.
Thanks for your comprehension, Angel
-
Angel Pons