[flashrom] [PATCH] Clean up bad board list

[Carl-Daniel Hailfinger]

Hi Uwe,

thank you for your comments. I tried to answer them in detail.

On 21.08.2009 20:59, Uwe Hermann wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 21, 2009 at 07:18:47PM +0200, Carl-Daniel Hailfinger wrote:
>   
>> while going through the bad board list, I noticed that some boards
>> either have no public test reports, are classified incorrectly or have
>> chipset instead of board problems. None of them should be listed.
>>     
>
> Hm, why not? The list contains boards that are verified not to work
> with flashrom. Whether this is due to missing board-enable or to missing
> chipset-code or to missing datasheets is irrelevant for the user,
> flashrom will still not work regardless of the reason.
>   

With that reasoning, we should add every every non-x86 board to the list
because flashrom doesn't support them (yet). And we should list all
Intel network cards because we don't suppport them. And every 3Com
network card which is not yet in the PCI ID list. Same applies to Nvidia
and ATI graphics cards.

Negative lists can grow very fast if we include every model in a class
of unsupported hardware. At most, list the class as unsupported. Then
again, we don't list unsupported programmers. And we don't list
unsupported network cards. Why shouldn't the same policy be applied to
mainboards? If the chipset is not supported, don't list the mainboards
at all.


> Maybe we also want a known-bad-chipsets list (for those without
> datasheets for example)?
>   

The chipset enable can simply issue a warning if not all functions are
supported. We fully support some chipsets for which we don't have
datasheets. If we don't support the chipset at all, we should not list it.


>> Chipset problem, not board related:
>> "ASUS" "M3N78 Pro"
>>     
>
> See above.
>
> In this case we don't have datasheets for NVIDIA flash translation IIRC,
> so yes, this affects all boards with that chipset using NVIDIA flash
> translation. It's not as easy as "all boards with MCP78 chipset" though
> (unfortunately).
>   

I hope I explained my point above well enough.


>> Flashrom works with coreboot, fails only under factory BIOS:
>> "MSI" "MS-7260 (K9N Neo)"
>>     
>
> Yeah, this is debatable, and I should probably re-check latest flashrom
> here with BIOS and coreboot, maybe things changed.
>   

Can't we at least list that board as semi-supported instead of broken?


>> No report:
>> "FIC" "VA-502"
>> "Soyo" "SY-5VD"
>>     
>
> These two can stay, the info was taken from the wiki, and added to the
> wiki by me quite a while ago. I tested both boards myself using actual
> hardware.
>
> http://www.coreboot.org/index.php?title=Flashrom&diff=next&oldid=7265
> http://www.coreboot.org/index.php?title=Flashrom&diff=next&oldid=7321
>   

OK, can stay.


>> "PCCHIPS" "M537DMA33"
>>     
>
> This guy I'll have to check. Also added by me in
> http://www.coreboot.org/index.php?title=Flashrom&diff=next&oldid=7304
> but I can't remember if this is a board I owned or if I added the
> entry based on info from someone in IRC (or maybe I tested a board
> of some friend or so, dunno).
>
> Feel free to drop this one for now, if I can verify where the report
> came from we can re-add it.
>   

Thanks, I'll send an updated patch.

Regards,
Carl-Daniel

-- 
http://www.hailfinger.org/