On Mon, Mar 18, 2013 at 7:07 PM, Peter Stuge <[email protected]> wrote: > Marc Jones wrote: >> Mentoring isn't hard work, but it does take attention every week > .. >> The lack of interest is is a bit ironic > > Please don't confuse lack of time for lack of interest. > > I am sure that quite a lot of people in the coreboot community are > interested in participating in GSoC, but I think it is clear to > everyone that in order to do so we would have to bring significantly > more to the table, and I guess that there simply isn't time for that. > >> we have had more contributions to coreboot than ever before. > > While that *is* true, the community landscape has also changed quite > drastically over the last few years. There are only very few code > contributors for the majority of the code. Economy of scale is > clearly in play, meaning much less margin all around. > > >> Honestly, I'm disappointed that we can't identify good projects and >> guidance for new firmware developers. > > Most everyone is too busy even to rework their own code, and > coreboot.git is merely a public repository with a bit of > shared infrastructure. > > There is next to no interaction in the community, so I'm not at all > surprised that we fail to identify projects and processes. When it > doesn't even work for the community, how could it work for us > bringing another community (students) into ours? >
i would like to see increased interaction. In some ways gerrit has helped in code reviews, but it has hindered general development discussion. > >> Without good complete project ideas, applying for GSoC is pointless. > > Certainly agreed. > > >> Please put forward coreboot, flashrom, and payload ideas. > > None of the modern platform development in coreboot happens in > the open, so anything related to that is basically not doable. > > The only doable coreboot project I can think of is to implement AGESA > for a new mainboard. It took Rudolf a few months to climb the AGESA > learning curve, and at the moment I believe he is the only community > member outside of AMD who has done that. > > Doing an AGESA port would be quite educational for a student, but > obviously also immensely challenging, because unlike Rudolf the > student probably does not have years of experience with PC firmware. True, but given a good mentor and working on it everyday should be very do-able. Especially with a well selected student and target. > > A good student would continue to intelligently drive discussion about > how to integrate AGESA and coreboot better, while also keeping an eye > toward keeping AGESA code as pristine as possible in order to > facilitate inclusion of possible later code drops from AMD. (This is > part of the "Move configuration to Kconfig" Infrastructure Project.) > > I don't expect qualified applicants. I would love to be proven wrong. Firmware development is certainly some of the toughest to get started with and it is even more difficult in x86. This has been a hurdle even for veterans. > > > Other than that, there are various uninspiring infrastructure projects: > http://www.coreboot.org/Infrastructure_Projects > > > Payloads - a way to provide UEFI with Secure Boot support is the only > thing that mainstream industry has any interest in, since that's what > Microsoft requires for certification. David and Patrick were already > working on that, so there's not much for a student project to do.. I think that there is probably a lot to do for a UEFI payload, but I don't know. Patrick or Stefan would know better. > > Other payload ideas include a solution for chaining payloads, so that > coreboot starts one payload, but that payload can in turn start one > other payload after it has finished. This would be a simple > libpayload project. The code for this is already available in > SeaBIOS. A good use case would be for the nvramtool-like utility that > Patrick wrote, allowing a boot-time menu or in fact a more complex > sequence of payloads to be configured into coreboot Kconfig and maybe > built all at once while building coreboot - similar to how SeaBIOS > gets built. > I think that these are some really good ideas. Would you like to put them on the wiki page and start flushing them out? I think that it is payload and infrastructure projects where most students would be capable of finishing in a summer project. I don't know if we will get student interest in that type of project. it is hard to find people that are passionate about firmware, but I would like to try to be positive and promote the advances that we have made in the last few years. Thanks for your thoughtful response. Marc -- http://se-eng.com -- coreboot mailing list: [email protected] http://www.coreboot.org/mailman/listinfo/coreboot
