Hi,
Gerd Hoffmann wrote:
Note that the linux kernel's in-kernel interfaces are explicitly *not* backward compatible though.
..
I fail to see the problem. seabios is part of the firmware,
So that's important, I hope to help create some understanding:
coreboot and SeaBIOS are cleanly separated.
This separation compares quite well to the clean separation between Linux kernel and the many applications you mention which depend on kernel APIs.
I agree that coreboot should also pull weight to maintain compatibility here, but now and then all the burden falls on payloads. :\
users are not going to freely mix and match versions.
You do recognize that this is a self-fulfilling prophecy, I hope?
They're certainly not going to do it if it was made impossible!
So if you are stuck with an old coreboot version for whatever reason, just continue using an old seabios version.
I find that attitude absolutely obnoxious, which is why I question whether SeaBIOS indeed wants to proceed with such an offensive change.
Boards are removed from coreboot in most every release so "getting stuck" is a real thing.
Announcing a deprecation flag day in the next SeaBIOS release to give people not reading every patch on this list an opportunity to engage is an easy ask. Why the rush?
It's not like seabios does see heavy development, and the changes going in are mostly for new hardware support (recent example is nvme) which doesn't buy you much on old machines.
This just sounds like privilege, especially given Volker's recent threading/interrupt bugfix. That's a perfect example of a significant improvement which should be available also with older coreboot.
Could of course create some SeaBIOS branches for backports and release master to move fast and break stuff, but I don't think that's the best option here.
Firmware is not QEMU.
Note that coreboot apparently considers 5 years of backward compatibility enough. They supported both old and new method for finding cbfs that long.
Do you mean within the coreboot codebase?
I agree with you if you suggest that coreboot should not remove backwards compatibility in the payload interface willy-nilly!
But I assume that's off the table, so SeaBIOS can only decide how it wants to behave.
//Peter