[coreboot] Supported Motherboards

[Patrick Georgi]

Am So., 25. Nov. 2018 um 17:14 Uhr schrieb Taiidan at gmx.com <Taiidan at gmx.com
>:

> I can agree yes some stuff that clearly no longer works should be
> removed from master but people were talking about for instance removing
> the native fam15h boards KGPE-D16 and KCMA-D8 (last and best owner
> controlled libre firmware x86 boards and arguably the best examples of
> coreboot ports and hw init code)
>
To be honest, in my opinion the Intel i945/gm45 hw init beats anything
that's out there for AMD.
I may be biased though :-)

I feel as though at the current rate of people being too eager to remove
> still functional boards for arbitrary reasons there won't be any easily
> obtainable non development boards on master -

It's not so arbitrary: The problem is that every deviation we carry along
in the tree means an explosion in the feature and test matrix: Every
boolean option means that we have twice as many configurations that could
go wrong.

There are two conflicting statements by non-developing users and we need
some decision on how to deal with them:

1. Users want new features that land on master to work on their boards.
2. Users don't want to invest time in keeping their boards working on
master.

2. is somewhat handled by telling users to go for the latest release and/or
commit that is known to work, but that means that they won't benefit from
newer features.

Even without the efforts to streamline coreboot development which mean that
old APIs are shut down, there's no guarantee that boards will remain
working on master without maintenance: This project deliberately does away
with the traditional BIOS development model of "copy, paste, modify and
forget", for greater cohesion and feature parity.

That approach comes at a cost, and one part of that is that without a
maintainer for a board (since we also do away with the "forget" part of
traditional BIOS development), the master branch is unreliable for that
board by default.
Once there is a maintainer, the changes advocated for the next release or
the one after that aren't _that_ much effort. And it's not like with the
romcc-romstage removal, where we removed classes of devices (those without
CAR), the changes proposed now are all completely on the software design
side.

It may even work to set aside some time dedicated to testing patches
somebody does without hardware access to bring up chipsets up to newest
standards. Naturally that has more friction than having developer and user
reside in the same place or even be the same person.
However for most boards we don't have any signal if anybody is still using
them or has a desire to use a newer revision than whatever they already
have on their boards.

Apparently this thread brought up some such interested parties, which I
already see as a benefit, but I'd rather have a mechanism that doesn't
require the threat of board removal. Suggestions welcome :-)

another side issue is that
> coreboot repos don't contain the libs required to compile the older
> versions which are becoming increasingly unavailable with some only
>
You're referring to the dependencies for crossgcc?
That's a good point, I'll see that I'll set up a mirror for those.
Everything else comes from git repos we control, so that should be safe. If
I'm missing anything else in this assessment, I'd like to learn about it so
I can fix it.


> since it will only be able to initiate new x86 systems that happen to
> require binary blobs.
>
Why no ARM or RISC-V? :-(

I have never met a comp-sci/comp-engineering graduate or anyone in a
> computer field who has heard of coreboot and that needs to change
>
Uni Heidelberg used to use coreboot for FPGA work on AMD gear, they even
contributed.
There are a few master theses that were written around coreboot.

Also, everybody on this mailing list is arguably "in a computer field" and
I'd suggest that they have heard of coreboot.


Patrick
-- 
Google Germany GmbH, ABC-Str. 19, 20354 Hamburg
Registergericht und -nummer: Hamburg, HRB 86891, Sitz der Gesellschaft:
Hamburg
Geschäftsführer: Paul Manicle, Halimah DeLaine Prado
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.coreboot.org/pipermail/coreboot/attachments/20181126/bf42bd4b/attachment.html>