[coreboot] [RFC] marketing coreboot after recent support of AMD board

[Paul Menzel]

Dear coreboot community,


it is really amazing what happened in the last years and especially in
the last months. A lot of people came – for me – out of nowhere and did
great contributions. Also AMD did great with their latest contributions
[1].

Today, Scott sent a patch to the list to support the board ASRock E350M1
[2, 3, 4]. If I am not mistaken there have been only a few cases, it
could be the first, where such a *recent* consumer board is supported by
coreboot. And that is the reason I am writing this message.

This also means that most of the computer magazines (online – at least
in Europe – and print) have not yet published reviews and the board is
not yet old enough to be considered by consumers. You guys have more
experience than I on how these reviewer networks work, but is there an
easy way to get these boards tested by these people with coreboot?

I came up with the following steps to be accomplished to reach that
goal.

     1. Contact ASRock. Does anyone have contacts at ASRock to get
        documentation or even hardware or man power?
     2. Get Windows running. Scott wrote that Windows does not boot yet.
        Since the market share of Windows in the home desktop market is
        still the biggest, that would of course be a requirement.
     3. Get GNU/Linux running. I think FLOSS users are more open to try
        new things. So to get to them, GNU/Linux should at least be able
        to boot.
     4. Wiki page and feature list. A page in our Wiki [5] should be set
        up with detailed instructions on how to create an image, what
        features (ACPI, power management, suspend/resume, connectors, …)
        work and, when the patch is committed, what revision was tested.
     5. Comparison with the vendor BIOS. People of course would only be
        interested if coreboot is superior to the vendor BIOS. And I
        would imagine that normal users would be most interested in boot
        time. Is coreboot faster?
     6. Flashrom support or “precompiled” images. To make it easy for
        the reviewers and early adopters flashing using Flashrom should
        work or precompiled images should be made available, if it is
        legally possible, and even flash chips offered or send to the
        reviewers which they can easily plug into the board and start
        testing. Is there a foundation (e. g. FSF), organization or
        cooperation (e. g. Google) which could sponsor to buy like
        200(?) spare flash chips, which then can be programmed? What
        flash chips are compatible with this board?
     7. Contact everybody. When all of the above has been accomplished,
        the magazines, reviewing sites, news sites, LUGs, communities
        should be informed. Magazines get the chips send to and
        consumers can order them from a coreboot developer.

Do you think that is a feasible roadmap? If yes, a lot of testing and
work needs to be done and Scott, of course, cannot do that alone. So
people willing to help, should get a this board, spare flash chips, and
start mostly testing. I am not a developer, so I could not help to
improve the support, but I could test and maybe even create a live image
to flash that image from an USB storage device.

It looks difficult though to get this board [6].

Another chicken and egg problem is, if this announcement should be made
public outside of the coreboot community only after support is complete
or before, i. e., are there communities (e. g. FSF) or project
developers which would help to support this effort?

Unfortunately CeBit is going to already start next week, so we will not
be able to show the new support off there.


I am looking forward to your thoughts. Thanks,

Paul


[1] http://www.coreboot.org/News#2011.2F2.2F14_AMD_submits_coreboot_support_for_AMD_Embedded_G-Series_Platforms
[2] http://www.coreboot.org/pipermail/coreboot/2011-February/063737.html
[3] http://www.asrock.com/mb/overview.asp?Model=E350M1
[4] http://notabs.org/pictures/ASRock-E350M1/
[5] http://www.coreboot.org/Welcome_to_coreboot
[6] http://www.coreboot.org/pipermail/coreboot/2011-February/063757.html
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