[coreboot] Announcing coreboot 4.1

[Vadim Bendebury]

.1 version increase after five years and such dramatic changes in the
product? You should have bumped it by at least 1.0 :)

--vb


On Mon, Jul 13, 2015 at 1:05 PM, Patrick Georgi <pgeorgi at google.com> wrote:
> Dear coreboot community,
>
> It has been more than 5 years since we have “released” coreboot ‘4.0’.
> That last release marked some very important milestones that we
> originally prototyped in the abandoned LinuxBIOS v3 efforts, like the
> coreboot filesystem (CBFS), Kconfig support, and (strictly) separate
> device trees, build logic and configuration.
>
> Since then there have been as many significant original developments,
> such as support for many new architectures (ARM, ARM64, MIPS, RISC-V),
> and related architectural changes like access to non-memory mapped SPI
> flash, or better insight about the internals of coreboot at runtime
> through the cbmem console, timestamp collection, or code coverage
> support.
>
> It became clear that a new release is overdue. With our new release
> process only slowly getting in shape, I decided to take a random
> commit and call it ‘4.1’.
>
> The release itself happens at an arbitrary point in time, but will
> serve as a starting point for other activities that require some kind
> of ‘starting point’ to build on, described below.
>
> Future releases will happen more frequently, and with more guarantees
> about the state of the release, like having a cool down phase where
> boards can be tested and so on. I plan to create a release every three
> months, so the changes between any two release don’t become too
> overwhelming.
>
> With the release of coreboot 4.1, you get an announcement (this
> email), a git tag (4.1), and tar archives at
> http://www.coreboot.org/releases/, for the coreboot sources and the
> redistributable blobs.
>
> Starting with coreboot 4.1, we will maintain a high level changelog
> and ‘flag days’ document. The latter will provide a concise list of
> changes which went into coreboot that require chipset or mainboard
> code to change to keep it working with the latest upstream coreboot.
>
> For the time being, I will run these efforts, but I’ll happily share
> documentation duties with somebody else - it is a great opportunity to
> keep track of things, learn about the project and its design and
> various internals, while contributing to the project without the need
> to code.
>
> Please contact me (for example by email or on IRC) if you’re
> interested, and we’ll work out how to collaborate on this.
>
> The process should enable users of coreboot to follow releases if they
> want a more static base to build on, while making it easier to follow
> along with new developments by providing upgrade documentation.
>
> Since moving away from a rolling (non-)release model is new for
> coreboot, things may still be a bit rough around the edges, but I’ll
> provide support for any issues that arise from the release process.
>
>
> Patrick
> --
> Google Germany GmbH, ABC-Str. 19, 20354 Hamburg
> Registergericht und -nummer: Hamburg, HRB 86891, Sitz der Gesellschaft: Hamburg
> Geschäftsführer: Graham Law, Christine Elizabeth Flores
>
> --
> coreboot mailing list: coreboot at coreboot.org
> http://www.coreboot.org/mailman/listinfo/coreboot