[coreboot] How is depreciating 95% of coreboot boards worth it for such minor improvements?

[Nico Huber]

Hi,

On 23.08.2017 06:00, Taiidan at gmx.com wrote:
> Just because a board lacks active developers doesn't mean that no one is
> using it.

right, and we won't stop anybody from using them in the future. Please
keep in mind, when a board is removed from the tree that only means that
the people working on newer boards don't maintain the old ones any more.
You can still check out the parent of the removal commit and build these
boards. I don't know which boards exactly are in question, but older
board ports are often broken anyway. So you can't argue that keeping
them in the tree would magically make them work.

> As a layman I simply can't understand as to how all these seemingly
> insignificant improvements such as CBMEM in ramstage make it worth
> removing almost every compatible board from the source,

I agree that these improvements would be insignificant to the boards in
question. Though, making improvements at all for newer platforms is much
harder if you have to take care of the old platforms (with incompatible
code) too.

> including nearly
> all the models that still have an open source init.

Can I see numbers please? I count about 50 Intel based boards (not
counting variants) with free init code which is actively developed.
There are more on the ARM front and probably some AMD based too. They'll
all stay. How many are we going to remove?

> To me it seems at the rate this is going soon all that will be left is a
> few blobbed and NDA'ed development boards unavailable to the general
> public.

What rate? how many have we removed already? 2? If you estimate from
that and the prospect that we'll remove 50+ one year later, well, then
we'd remove 1,000+ boards next year. That would indeed be a problem...

> 
> Am I mistaken?

Yes, I guess.

Nico