Rating System

Rating System

At the coreboot summit in Denver we talked about a rating system for supported boards. The idea is to make it clear which boards are most highly recommended because the vendors cooperate.

To get to such a rating for a particular board, we should establish a list of categories with an associated score.

Adding up the scores for the major components on a board (cpu, chipsets, mainboard, others?) would give us a rating that results in a number of 'stars'.

Some ideas for those categories:

• availability of documentation (nothing/NDA restricted == 0, NDA but free to publish code == 3, online with click through == 7, public URL == 10)
• vendor participation in the coreboot project
• ...

As we list boards, we should also make it clear if a board is actually available for purchase. A board might get a high rating, but be unavailable for purchase, in which case it should be carefully marked as such. Board availability will change over a board's lifespan.

Should we provide a separate rating for coreboot support (i.e. the stuff above) and how good our code actually is?