[coreboot] coreboot community meeting minutes for March 16th, 2017

Fri Mar 17 17:12:44 CET 2017

Here are the meeting minutes of yesterday's coreboot community meeting.
Info about the next meeting (March 31) is at the bottom.

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# Thursday, March 16, 2017

General coreboot news & discussions
 * Next coreboot release - 4.6 - scheduled for mid april
 * What to do about regression about serial console and some AMD
boards (Asus M2V)?
   - … concerning next release
     - The next release will happen in april with or without
regressions.  It can be delayed 2 weeks from mid april to the end of
april.  So we've got 4-6 weeks to find and fix issues if we want them
to be fixed in the next release.
 * What do we do if the commit introducing the regression is found,
and cannot be easily reverted?
   - Fix it?
 * libgfxinit is working on Haswell / will replace C code for Peppy/Falco
   - Need to update the coreboot builders to add ADA toolchain

Infrastructure Issues & News
 * Get Clang going again - what do we need to do to get it going?
   - There are some patches that list the directories to the intrinsic
functions, these don't work, so we get errors on division and
something else.  It's been a while since Martin worked on it, so he
can't quite recall.
     - can we look into adding the intrinsics directly into the coreboot source?
 * coreboot updated the toolchain - Please rebuild yours.
 *Jenkins was updated to version 2.32.3 & the plugins
 * Added new builder "BoringBuilder" - Managed by Philipp.  This
builder is still occasionally having hiccups, we're trying to stay on
top of failed builds while we're figuring out the builder failures.
 * We've updated the log retention policy for coreboot-gerrit builds.
All build results will be kept for 45 days.  Previous policy removed
logs after 500 builds or 21 days.  At 50 builds a day (or more) on a
busy weekday, this meant that logs were only kept for 10 days.
 * The main coreboot server locked up March 15 and needed to be reset.
We will be moving pieces over to a new server that we've already got
in place.  Philipp has volunteered to help with this if needed.
 * Looking forward to easing GNAT (GCC's Ada frontend) build.
 * REACTS throws occasional test failures (false negatives) on the
KGPE-D16.  This may be related to the suspected race condition
somewhere in the coreboot console; the logs sent support this by
locking up end somewhat randomly in the middle of serial output.
Raptor plans to investigate further later this month / early next.
Per Martin the KGPE-D16 is not the only board known to be affected by
random hangs related to console / serial - This was also seen during
the bringup of the camelback mountain board.

Development
* How do we feel about changing the coding style to move constants in
comparisons to the left side?  if (0 == x) instead of (x == 0)
   - The argument for doing this was that this style finds errors in
any environment
   - Ron is very opposed.
   - There's compiler support for finding the issues this exposes
(namely if (x = 0)), which is more robust than a weird style guide.
   - Concluded that this will be left up to the individual developer,
and to disable the checkpatch check.
* libgfxinit has a new Linux user-space test tool
* libpayload: Mouse cursor patches submitted, needs reviews
  - Tested using cbui payload
* SeaVGABIOS: Improved Windows support, needs some more asm magic to finalize
 - Windows now works with native graphics init

Conference news
* Both homepages are WIP.  Philipp will fix some issues today.
* We are searching for Sponsors of the ECC'17, feel free to contact
zaolin at coreboot.org if you know companies who might be interested in
joining us.

Interesting External news items
 * AMD, Ryzen & coreboot - Will AMD be more open?
    - https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/837367956229206016
    -https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/5x4hxu/we_are_amd_creators_of_athlon_radeon_and_other/def5h1b/
    - https://www.golem.de/news/freie-firmware-amd-prueft-coreboot-support-fuer-ryzen-1703-126524.html
    - This will take some time until they respond or they'll ignore us.
    - Comments from bridgman (closest thing we have to an "inside
source") are not promising, but shed light on why the PSP is closed /
locked:
      https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/software/bsd-mac-os-x-hurd-others/938051-intel-to-increase-engagement-with-freebsd-makes-250k-donation?p=938297#post938297
    - AMD does not seem to be aware that the technologies required to
secure open systems are already becoming available from at least two
third parties (Raptor Engineering, possibly Google) -- how to make
them aware?
        - More to the point -- need to show open, secure systems are
profitable or investment in the required new technology will not be
made by AMD!

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Next meeting is March 31, 2017
Check the coreboot calendar for the time in your timezone
https://www.coreboot.org/calendar.html

Join using the bluejeans web app or the phone bridge:
    https://bluejeans.com/616384323

Phone bridge call in numbers:  https://www.bluejeans.com/numbers
    Meeting ID: 616384323

Current agenda & history:
    https://coreboot-meeting.pads.ccc.de/CommunityMeetingTopics