[LinuxBIOS] State of the buildrom

[Ward Vandewege]

On Thu, Nov 29, 2007 at 11:41:12AM -0700, Jordan Crouse wrote:
> We've been doing a lot of hacking on buildrom lately.  Thanks to everybody,
> especially Ward and Myles.  I wanted to take some time to discuss where
> we are and particularly where we want to go.
> 
> Here is where we are:
> 
> * v2 support for 10 platforms (alix1c, db800, dbe61, ga-2761gxdk, m57sli, 
>   msm800sev, norwich, serengeti_cheetah, tyan-s2882 and tyan-s2891).

And adding new platforms is not very difficult.

> * gPXE:  Ward is taking the lead on this

r70 now has gPXE payload support; it does not work yet though because the
gPXE tree is in flux, and (for the moment) no longer has LinuxBIOS support.

> * buildroot/firmware_linux/etc:  I'm still interested in partnering with
> other build systems in an effort to better scale support for LAB 
> payloads.

That would be great. I'm not sure what the best way forward is here though;
seems like the major distros have each taken a somewhat separate path here.

> * Optimizations:  There are always things we can do to clean up - add -j N
> support for make, reduce memory usage, avoid stupid gmake tricks and the
> like.  I think things are stable enough in the core that we can start to
> twist some knobs without blowing everything up.

There's some other stuff that would be nice:

- aborting the build nicely when the generated image is too large
- support for different rom chip sizes (in kconfig)
- do something about the patching of LinuxBIOS Config files

We talked about some of this before on IRC; I seem to recall Jordan's feeling
was that the last 2 points would be easier under v3. Should we focus our
efforts there for these improvements?

Thanks,
Ward.

-- 
Ward Vandewege <ward at fsf.org>
Free Software Foundation - Senior System Administrator