[coreboot] [announce] coreboot for the 21st century

[Stefan Reinauer]

coreboot for the 21st century

setting up the project for the next decade

Purpose: Purge all boards / chipsets / cpus that require ROMCC in
romstage and known broken chipsets (sc520, i855)

coreboot is now officially 15 years old. One and a half long decades
with ups and downs. During this time we collected over 250 different
mainboards. A great achievement, but also a great maintenance burden.

* It is hard to keep 250+ mainboards working. Actually impossible.
* Keeping them working comes at a cost. Keep old infrastructure around.
  Workarounds, special cases
* We don’t test except on the very last stuff we’re working on

To fix this issue, we suggest to establish a process to obsolete old
hardware in a controlled way. Getting rid of old baggage is great and
liberating for future products, but it is also one of the moves the
strictly hobbyist community considers corporate driven. Hence, we want
to satisfy both a speedy light-weight development process and keeping
all the good coreboot legacy alive. 

For the first time in 2014, and every few years after that (e.g. every
two years), we will create a new “community branch” that focusses on
older mainboards. This branch will start out as an exact copy of ToT
coreboot. Suggested name: “coreboot-community-2014” or “coreboot-v4.0”.
Then this branch will not get any further new feature development (of
features not available in ToT) but only bug fixes for boards to get them
working and potentially backports.

After the branch is created, all obsoleted mainboards are removed from
the main repository. The version will be coreboot 4.1. Cleanup shall
begin to remove all the cruft that we had around to get those old boards
working. Each mainboard in v4.1 will have a supporter / owner. New
mainboards are not admitted into V4.1 without a supporter / owner.

If somebody in the community wants to keep a board / chipset alive in
the tree, they can re-import them by cleaning up the board to work with
the new, cruft free infrastructure.

In 2016 we will do the same thing again, and it will become coreboot 6.0

Appendix A: romcc boards to be removed

  advantech/pcm-5820
  asi/mb_5blgp
  asi/mb_5blmp
  axus/tc320
  bcom/winnet100
  bifferos/bifferboard
  digitallogic/msm586seg
  dmp/vortex86ex
  eaglelion/5bcm
  iei/juki-511p
  iei/nova4899r
  intel/jarrell
  intel/truxton
  intel/xe7501devkit
  supermicro/x6dai_g
  supermicro/x6dhe_g2
  supermicro/x6dhe_g
  supermicro/x6dhr_ig2
  supermicro/x6dhr_ig
  technologic/ts5300
  televideo/tc7020
  via/epia
  via/epia-m
  via/epia-n