[RFC] Proposal to move all FSP 1.x binaries to "legacy" branch

[Desimone, Nathaniel L]

Hi Everyone,

Given that the newest coreboot releases have not supported the FSP 1.x specification for years now, seems that the 1.x FSP binaries at https://github.com/intel/FSP have become increasingly limited in their usefulness. For this reason, I would like to move those older binaries off master branch and create a new “legacy” branch to store them. I'll be sure to mention the legacy branch in the readme.md file in master. Any concerns with this change?

Thanks,
Nate

[Jay Talbott]

Hi Nate,

We still support the older FSP 1.x platforms, so the 1.x FSP binaries are still very useful to us, so we would appreciate it if you did NOT make this change. Coreboot still has a maintenance branch off of the 4.11 release for ongoing support of FSP 1.x platforms, and such a change would break the builds from this branch.

Thanks,

- Jay

Jay Talbott
Principal Consulting Engineer
SysPro Consulting, LLC
3057 E. Muirfield St.
Gilbert, AZ 85298
[phone]
[phone] (FAX)
[e-mail]
http://www.sysproconsulting.com
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Desimone, Nathaniel L [mailto:[e-mail]]
> Sent: Thursday, September 3, 2020 6:29 PM
> To: [e-mail]
> Subject: [coreboot] [RFC] Proposal to move all FSP 1.x binaries to "legacy"
> branch
>
> Hi Everyone,
>
> Given that the newest coreboot releases have not supported the FSP 1.x
> specification for years now, seems that the 1.x FSP binaries at
> https://github.com/intel/FSP have become increasingly limited in their
> usefulness. For this reason, I would like to move those older binaries off master
> branch and create a new “legacy” branch to store them. I'll be sure to mention
> the legacy branch in the readme.md file in master. Any concerns with this
> change?
>
> Thanks,
> Nate
>
> coreboot mailing list -- [e-mail]
> To unsubscribe send an email to [e-mail]

[Matt DeVillier]

On Thu, Sep 3, 2020 at 8:29 PM Desimone, Nathaniel L
 wrote:
> Hi Everyone,
>
> Given that the newest coreboot releases have not supported the FSP 1.x specification for years now

support for FSP 1.0 was dropped, but FSP 1.1 is still used by Braswell
and supported in coreboot master
> seems that the 1.x FSP binaries at https://github.com/intel/FSP have become increasingly limited in their usefulness. For this reason, I would like to move those older binaries off master branch and create a new “legacy” branch to store them. I'll be sure to mention the legacy branch in the readme.md file in master. Any concerns with this change?

the biggest issue would be that even if coreboot did entirely drop
support for FSP 1.x in master, there would still be older
tags/branches from which boards using FSP 1.x could be built, and
moving those FSP binaries out of the master branch would break
building of those boards without changes to the older coreboot
branches to handle that, which would become quite tricky if one then
needs to support pulling FSP from multiple branches
> Thanks,
> Nate
>
> coreboot mailing list -- [e-mail]
> To unsubscribe send an email to [e-mail]

[Nico Huber]

Hi,

On 04.09.20 04:11, Matt DeVillier wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 3, 2020 at 8:29 PM Desimone, Nathaniel L
>  wrote:
> > Given that the newest coreboot releases have not supported the FSP 1.x specification for years now
>
> support for FSP 1.0 was dropped, but FSP 1.1 is still used by Braswell
> and supported in coreboot master

one possible workaround for coreboot master would be to hook the FSP
repository up a second time (to have two submodule pointers). But even
if it's not hard to support, I wonder what is the benefit of a legacy
branch?
> > seems that the 1.x FSP binaries at https://github.com/intel/FSP have become increasingly limited in their usefulness. For this reason, I would like to move those older binaries off master branch and create a new “legacy” branch to store them. I'll be sure to mention the legacy branch in the readme.md file in master. Any concerns with this change?
>
> the biggest issue would be that even if coreboot did entirely drop
> support for FSP 1.x in master, there would still be older
> tags/branches from which boards using FSP 1.x could be built, and
> moving those FSP binaries out of the master branch would break
> building of those boards without changes to the older coreboot
> branches to handle that, which would become quite tricky if one then
> needs to support pulling FSP from multiple branches

I would expect the opposite. At least for all coreboot revisions that
use a Git submodule. Those point to commits, not branches, and hence
should always work as long as the branch history is kept in tact
upstream.

Nico

[Patrick Georgi]

Am Fr., 4. Sept. 2020 um 10:56 Uhr schrieb Nico Huber :
> I would expect the opposite. At least for all coreboot revisions that

use a Git submodule. Those point to commits, not branches, and hence
> should always work as long as the branch history is kept in tact
> upstream.

Indeed: As long as there's no git history rewriting involved, the branches
will just continue to work because they point to commit ids.

Nate, if there's strong interest in retiring binaries (although that will
only reduce download size for shallow clones, so I'm not too sure what's
the point), could you keep FSP 1.1 around and just retire FSP 1.0?

Patrick

[Desimone, Nathaniel L]

100% agreed, I will only move FSP 1.0 and not FSP 1.1 binaries.

From: Patrick Georgi 
Sent: Tuesday, September 8, 2020 5:15 AM
To: Nico Huber 
Cc: Matt DeVillier ; Desimone, Nathaniel L ; [e-mail]
Subject: Re: [coreboot] Re: [RFC] Proposal to move all FSP 1.x binaries to "legacy" branch

Nate, if there's strong interest in retiring binaries (although that will only reduce download size for shallow clones, so I'm not too sure what's the point), could you keep FSP 1.1 around and just retire FSP 1.0?

[Desimone, Nathaniel L]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Matt DeVillier 
> Sent: Thursday, September 3, 2020 7:11 PM
> To: Desimone, Nathaniel L 
> Cc: [e-mail]
> Subject: Re: [coreboot] [RFC] Proposal to move all FSP 1.x binaries to "legacy"
> branch
>
> support for FSP 1.0 was dropped, but FSP 1.1 is still used by Braswell and
> supported in coreboot master

That is good feedback, thank you!
> the biggest issue would be that even if coreboot did entirely drop support for
> FSP 1.x in master, there would still be older tags/branches from which boards
> using FSP 1.x could be built, and moving those FSP binaries out of the master
> branch would break building of those boards without changes to the older
> coreboot branches to handle that, which would become quite tricky if one then
> needs to support pulling FSP from multiple branches

For Braswell and other FSP 1.1 projects on coreboot master branch this makes a lot of sense. The FSP submodule pointer will be continually updated, which would cause Braswell to break. But for maintenance branches and tags, the submodule pointer will point to an older version of FSP master branch where those binaries still existed. The maintenance branches can either stay on the older master SHA or update to the newer legacy branch SHA.

Based on your feedback and Jay's feedback, I will only move the FSP 1.0 binaries to the legacy branch, so that way the combination of coreboot master branch + FSP master branch continues to work. Maintenance branches and older tags will continue to work with older SHAs.

Thanks,
Nate