[coreboot] soc/amd/stoneyridge

[Martin Roth]

On Sat, Jun 10, 2017 at 4:33 AM, Paul Menzel <paulepanter at users.
sourceforge.net> wrote:
...

> Seeing the lack of manpower for AMD systems, I am concerned about
> two(?) solutions that need to be maintained. If the current experiment
> succeeds, there should be a roadmap how the current boards will be
> ported.
>

I'm not speaking here for the coreboot leadership, for AMD, or anyone
besides myself.

As far as I know, there is no plan to port the current boards forward.
This will be completely new implementation, entirely separate from the old
boards.

I don't see AMD going back to supporting the older platforms.  Same with
Intel, Rockchip, Google, or any other company.  They're going to support
the platforms that there is a financial incentive to support.  As soon as
they don't have a financial reason to support the platform any longer, it's
really going to be up to the community to take over if we want them to
continue moving forward.

We complain about companies using binaries, but then we ALSO complain when
companies open up the code that they're using because it doesn't meet our
standards. They gave the code to the community to use, and we STILL can't
be happy about it.  It's OPEN.  Edit it. Fork it.  Make it our own. If
we're just going to complain, what incentive do they have to make it open?
They had to go through a lot of work internally to be able to publish it,
working with the lawyers and having engineers go through and scrub
references to things they can't release. The code isn't perfect, but what
code is?

If the community wants the older platforms to move forward, then WE should
pick up support for the platforms we care about.  If nobody cares enough
about the platforms to say that they're going to help support them, then
they're going to be removed from the main tree after one of the upcoming
releases due to missing features.  At that point, there will only be one
solution to be maintained again.

We have some incredible people who work on the coreboot project.  I'm
always amazed and grateful to what people are willing to do in their spare
time.  Companies, however, don't typically have the same motivations as we
do, so if we want the older "obsolete" platforms to continue to progress,
we, the community will have to do that work.


If we make it too difficult for companies to participate in upstream
coreboot, they're just going to fork the code internally and not get our
feedback or reviews.  In my opinion, it's much better if we TRY to get
companies to work at coreboot.org instead of making it difficult for them
by trying to require them to maintain platforms that they no longer care
about.



Martin
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