Preparing coreboot 4.9

[Patrick Georgi]

Hi everybody,

as Martin is swamped by other work, I'm taking over as the release manager
for 4.9.
Based on our schedule, we should have released 4.9 in October or early
November, but since those passed, I'll plan to release 4.9 two weeks from
now, on December 20th.

If you want, consider it an early Christmas present :-)
(Why early? I'd appreciate some last minute testing of the commit I'll pick
for the release, and it might be easier to drum up support for that when
family functions aren't interfering.)

The release after that will go back to our April/October schedule, so the
4.10 window will be rather short. Due to that, there will be no
deprecations announced in 4.9.
Arthur's proposals sparked some discussion that started activity to keep
some affected chipsets alive, and depending on how that unfolds, we can
reconsider those deprecations for the 4.10 release notes, to happen after
4.11 in late 2019.

Regarding release notes: I set up an etherpad copy of the release notes we
have so far at https://piratenpad.de/p/S8slYOeag. I'll collect the changes
of the last 8 months there, and I appreciate any help: if you made coreboot
do something new since 4.8, feel free to tell the world about it in the
upcoming release notes.

I chose this method over the usual gerrit workflow we use for documentation
because the latter doesn't scale so well when lots of changes happen close
to each other: git produces too many merge conflicts in such a case.
As part of the release process I'll push the release notes into the tree.

While we have no quality criterion for releases, we all like to be able to
point to releases as functional on our preferred hardware. Therefore,
please test the hardware you have with recent master, and maybe schedule
some time on the 19th or 20th to re-test master then, and report (or better
yet, fix) any issues you encounter.

While testing, consider adding to the board-status repository, too :-)

I guess every release needs a bit of hyperbole, so let me end this
announcement with a call to make this the best coreboot release ever!

Regards,
Patrick