[coreboot] Supported Motherboards

[Nico Huber]

On 11/11/18 2:52 PM, echelon at free.fr wrote:
>  So by force of circumstances, unfortunately, we can expect that the
>  g505s (of other agesa based boards) will indeed be dropped from the
>  coreboot master in the near future..

That's not what I said or intended to say (we might know if ppl.
wouldn't top post). I meant things may always be removed if not pro-
perly maintained, and that the AGESA code is one of these areas. It
wouldn't even be the first thing I'd drop, if I ever start to drop
things.

>  We (the owners of agesa based boards) need to prepare for this
>  eventuality, and maybe if we want to keep coreboot alive (and evolving)
>  on our platforms we should consider a fork... Please don't insult me
>  for this for this reasoning (it is not even a proposal..), but we must
>  face the reality..

Hmmm... I remember when these discussions around "board removals" from
the master branch started, we tried to make clear that development of
these boards could continue on other branches. These boards wouldn't get
the latest and greatest features any more but instead would not be
broken trying to add the latest features ;) That seems much better and
easier to handle than a port but was mostly rejected.

>  One problem I notice is that almost all the experts in the coreboot
>  comunity are focusing on Intel platforms nowadays (for professional
>  reasons I suppose..).

That's not what I see. There are a lot of young non-professionals (or
at least not employed for coreboot work) who start to work on coreboot.
They mostly end up working with Intel hardware too. Code quality might
be an issue. Compared to the better maintained open-source Intel code,
AGESA is much harder to read, some AMD code barely readable. The diver-
gence of AMD code might also be an issue. The Intel code all looks the
same and is easy to get into; if you read and understood one platform,
you understand the half of all Intel platforms in coreboot. For AMD
there are sometimes different implementations even for a single chip.

> So when "the push come to shove", it will be hard
>  for us newbs (yes Im an eternal newb in coreboot.. ;-)) to get advice
>  and support in our maintaining efforts..

AMD might be harder to configure than Intel, I'm not sure. But! there is
public documentation for a lot of the older platforms. It's likely not
complete but should be good enough to design the code. With some luck
you'd only need to look into AGESA to fill the gaps.

Nico