[coreboot] Support coreboot freelance developers (was: How is depreciating 95% of coreboot boards worth it for such minor improvements?)

[Paul Menzel]

Dear coreboot folks,


Am Mittwoch, den 23.08.2017, 20:42 -0600 schrieb Aaron Durbin:
> On Wed, Aug 23, 2017 at 8:31 PM, Kyösti Mälkki <kyosti.malkki at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Thu, Aug 24, 2017 at 12:29 AM, Taiidan at gmx.com <Taiidan at gmx.com> wrote:
> > > Ah I see thanks for explaining.
> > > 
> > > I had read all the AGESA boards were going to be removed, besides the asus
> > > D8/D16 those are the last and best owner controlled x86 boards.
> > > Is there a current list of boards to be removed?

> > The work for LATE -> EARLY CBMEM transition for AGESA has been
> > available for review since February 2017. It's probably announced or
> > mentioned only briefly on the mailing list, but certainly very visible
> > on gerrit.
> > 
> > Unfortunately people currently working on AMD platforms did not show
> > much interest to review that work. Luckily, devs from chromeos team
> > (who had no commercial interest, but maybe strings attached) stepped
> > in the reviews so that the groundwork of AGESA interface changes got
> > done and reviewed. What's left is merging the individual board
> > changes, which I am about to do very soon now. Some regressions
> > expected, most of the old defects remain unfixed.
> > 
> > I should thank the couple individuals and companies that contributed
> > by covering some costs of this development. Still, that does not
> > magically turn all these boards into status of "maintained".
> > 
> > Now, this applies to everyone: please push status updates for the
> > boards you have access to, otherwise majority of AGESA boards just hit
> > that deprecation in the next cycle of board removals. Also, when you
> > create a board port and you go through all the trouble of getting it
> > past (my strict or someone else's less strict) review policy, is it
> > REALLY that hard to run board_status script? You know who you are. Is
> > there something we need to do better here? Provide OS boot images just
> > for this purpose?
> > 
> > As for binaryPI boards, those are at EARLY_CBMEM_INIT starting from August 2.
> > 
> > As for K8/K10, your help is needed in testing. This is particularly
> > for boards with multiple CPU packages (nodes).
> 
> I do want to thank Kyösti for putting in the development effort in
> this area for these platforms. He's been actively maintaining and
> developing for a lot of platforms that have lost some love over the
> years. I know there are others who contribute as well, but I did want
> to call attention Kyösti's contribution as I've been following it
> fairly closely. It's very much appreciated.

I can only second that. I like to remind a lot of the coreboot users
out there to get in contact with the coreboot developers doing the work
for your board, and ask them how you can support them. Some of them
accept donations. Some can even give you invoices.

So please, support free software, and “pay for it” to keep the freedom
free software gives you.


Thanks,

Paul
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