[coreboot] coreboot community meeting January 5th, 2017 report

[Arthur Heymans]

Dear coreboot community

This is the report of yesterdays community meeting:

General coreboot news & Discussion
==================================

There is patch [1] up for review that implements LinuxBoot as payload.
      - Currently with u-root in the initrd, which is an userspace entirely
      written in go;
      - Currently only as a payload but in the future it could replace
      ramstage on some targets;
      - Currently its still WIP and doesn't work all that well with qemu
      targets;
      - It needs some Kconfig options for some simple example configurations;
      - In the future we also want to integrate the HEADS[2] userspace
      and possibly also an userspace featuring the petitboot kexec
      gui[3];

The 4.7 release is imminent and Martin will hopefully be able to finish
up the releasenotes this weekend.
The 4.6 release announced that after the 4.7 release platforms lacking
the early cbmem feature will be removed from the master branch. Those
platforms can then live in the 4.7 branch or be reintegrated when early
cbmem support is implemented. The details about how and when this will
happen have yet to be decided/discussed.

Development
===========

There was some discussion about how to move forward to use the new ACPI
ASL 2.0 syntax, which is considered more readable. There previously was
a discussion on this topic on the mailing list [4].
Currently it is possible with iasl to compile and decompile our ASL
sources to the new syntax but this would lose all our comments, so
ideally a new tool would need to be written to handle that
transition. It was also suggested that given the fact that coreboot
has reproducibel timeless builds, it would be able to tell if anything
changed in the resulting binary, which it shouldn't since the resulting
bytecode ought to be the same.

In the mean time we still need to have a discussion about what do with
for instance new asl source files: do we still want the old syntax or is
the new syntax ok for new files? Mixing syntaxes in existing files
seemed a bad idea.

So what are your ideas and opinions on this?

Infrastructure
==============

The pre-commit hook doesn't return failures on 'make lint-stable' but
this seems to be fixed in [5].

Documentation
=============

Currently there is an effort going on to have the documentation
accessible in one place on the web. The current idea was to use hugo for
static webpage generation for this, see [6]. Some concerns were however
raised that this particular theme works rather poorly without
javascript, so it might be desirable to find a better lightweight
theme.
Related to this, is the ongoing effort to convert our current
documentation to markdown and move those files to a different directory
which starts with lowercase letter for consistency, with a separation of
a content and a static folder.
The idea to use netlify to push it to the production server was also
suggested. (Philipp might be able to say something in more details about
this)

Flashrom 1.0 was released!
This new release has some nice new features that make handling some
blobs like the IFD/GBE/ME/... on Intel systems much easier. One can now
with the --ifd flag fetch the flash layout from flash and use this to
read/write/erase those regions. Also a --noverify-all or -N flag was
introduced which skips verifying regions that were not touched at all,
which can greatly speed up flashing if one is only writing to a small
region on a large flash. Our guides however need to be adapted to use
these features. One example where this has already been done is [7]
which still has the old instructions for reference.
In the future flashrom will support Linux MTD (memory technology
device) which can remove the need to boot Linux without strict checking
of MMIO memory regions (currently flashrom needs the iomem=relaxed boot
parameter to use the internal programmer).



I hope you can join us next time!

Kind regards

Arthur


[1] https://review.coreboot.org/#/c/coreboot/+/23071/
[2] https://trmm.net/Heads
[3] https://github.com/ArthurHeymans/petitboot_for_coreboot
[4]
https://mail.coreboot.org/pipermail/coreboot/2016-September/082050.html
[5] https://review.coreboot.org/#/c/coreboot/+/23130/
[6] https://www.coreboot.org/Documentation/
[7] https://www.coreboot.org/Board:lenovo/x200#Flashing_your_coreboot_ROM_image