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

[R S]

Thanks for providing this summary.

On Fri, Jan 5, 2018 at 8:34 AM, Arthur Heymans <arthur at aheymans.xyz> wrote:

> 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
>
> --
> coreboot mailing list: coreboot at coreboot.org
> https://mail.coreboot.org/mailman/listinfo/coreboot
>



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