[coreboot] coreboot 2013 Google Summer of Code: Call for mentors and project ideas

[Peter Stuge]

Marc Jones wrote:
> Mentoring isn't hard work, but it does take attention every week
..
> The lack of interest is is a bit ironic

Please don't confuse lack of time for lack of interest.

I am sure that quite a lot of people in the coreboot community are
interested in participating in GSoC, but I think it is clear to
everyone that in order to do so we would have to bring significantly
more to the table, and I guess that there simply isn't time for that.

> we have had more contributions to coreboot than ever before.

While that *is* true, the community landscape has also changed quite
drastically over the last few years. There are only very few code
contributors for the majority of the code. Economy of scale is
clearly in play, meaning much less margin all around.


> Honestly, I'm disappointed that we can't identify good projects and
> guidance for new firmware developers.

Most everyone is too busy even to rework their own code, and
coreboot.git is merely a public repository with a bit of
shared infrastructure.

There is next to no interaction in the community, so I'm not at all
surprised that we fail to identify projects and processes. When it
doesn't even work for the community, how could it work for us
bringing another community (students) into ours?


> Without good complete project ideas, applying for GSoC is pointless.

Certainly agreed.


> Please put forward coreboot, flashrom, and payload ideas.

None of the modern platform development in coreboot happens in
the open, so anything related to that is basically not doable.

The only doable coreboot project I can think of is to implement AGESA
for a new mainboard. It took Rudolf a few months to climb the AGESA
learning curve, and at the moment I believe he is the only community
member outside of AMD who has done that.

Doing an AGESA port would be quite educational for a student, but
obviously also immensely challenging, because unlike Rudolf the
student probably does not have years of experience with PC firmware.

A good student would continue to intelligently drive discussion about
how to integrate AGESA and coreboot better, while also keeping an eye
toward keeping AGESA code as pristine as possible in order to
facilitate inclusion of possible later code drops from AMD. (This is
part of the "Move configuration to Kconfig" Infrastructure Project.)

I don't expect qualified applicants. I would love to be proven wrong.


Other than that, there are various uninspiring infrastructure projects:
http://www.coreboot.org/Infrastructure_Projects


Payloads - a way to provide UEFI with Secure Boot support is the only
thing that mainstream industry has any interest in, since that's what
Microsoft requires for certification. David and Patrick were already
working on that, so there's not much for a student project to do..

Other payload ideas include a solution for chaining payloads, so that
coreboot starts one payload, but that payload can in turn start one
other payload after it has finished. This would be a simple
libpayload project. The code for this is already available in
SeaBIOS. A good use case would be for the nvramtool-like utility that
Patrick wrote, allowing a boot-time menu or in fact a more complex
sequence of payloads to be configured into coreboot Kconfig and maybe
built all at once while building coreboot - similar to how SeaBIOS
gets built.


//Peter