[coreboot] BIOS/CoreBoot/UBOOT

[ron minnich]

At this point, on this platform, I think your fastest bet to mostly open
sourcing it all is linuxboot. We recently had an experience where we
installed a linux kernel in FLASH on  two new boards in two days and most
of that was just figuring out how to rearrange the UEFI bits, (i.e. move
the furniture around :-) not building code. You can now replace a lot of
UEFI with a linux kernel and the only thing you have to build is ... a
Linux kernel.

We recently found that for supported boards, a git clone of the linuxboot
repo and full build takes 2 minutes 45 seconds, and that's essentially
hands off.

If you have a UEFI system, which that board almost certainly is, I think
you can skip coreboot and u-boot entirely and just take the linuxboot
approach. I'm no longer that big a fan of FSP, it has its own problems.

I realize in this note there's a lot of "Alphabet soup" (many, many names
like UEFI and FSP and all ...) but the short form is this: with modern x86
CPUs, the coreboot port is indeed a very large effort. The linuxboot effort
is, as mentioned, as little as a day in some cases. I can tell you from
experience it is far less work and, ironically, can also result in the use
of fewer binary blobs on these CPUs.

Obviously, for open CPUs, I still prefer coreboot; but x86 CPUs are no
longer open in any meaningful sense of the word.
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