[coreboot] coreboot certified hardware

David Hendricks david.hendricks at gmail.com
Tue Oct 5 07:59:31 CEST 2010


On Mon, Oct 4, 2010 at 12:23 PM, Peter Stuge <peter at stuge.se> wrote:

> phorsyon wrote:
> > a minimal and a consumer version of a certificate
>
> As was mentioned, the more certifications there are, the less easy it
> is for the market to make use of them.
>
> I don't think we can afford to try to market two different
> certifications. I would only like to try for one; "consumer coreboot"
> or rather; "coreboot complete"
>
> Developers don't want problems any more than average users just
> because they may know how to deal with problems.
>
> Anyway, if we would have criteria then we could also track them.
>
> Any interested developer could easily discover what was missing for
> a board to be coreboot complete, judge if it is a good choice for
> them at the moment, and if not just look for completeness of other
> boards.


I agree with Peter here, and will add my $0.02 to the thread...

Certification is a *huge* process, at least if you want it to mean anything.
I would expect that a true certification effort would rival development of
the code itself. Multiple levels of certification only complicate the
process and confuse users. And quite honestly, I don't expect that to happen
unless a lot of dedicated resources are poured into it.

Perhaps the best thing is simply to publish a giant testing matrix for each
board. Certify against the absolute bare minimum technical requirements, ie,
can all on-board devices be initialized by firmware, are SMBIOS tables
populated, etc. Leave it up to the system builder to decide whether or not
if it's usable for the application.

Maybe someone (FSF?) wants to create a higher-level standard that includes
Coreboot along with a full free software stack, but that shouldn't be key to
Coreboot certification at any level or you risk alienating major commercial
partners. Heck, everyone in the Coreboot community ought to be flattered if
a major OEM ships a "Made for Win7" computer with Coreboot on it.

Certify stuff that you know, leave everything else up to vendors.
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