[coreboot] Chromium Upstreaming / Introduction

[Stefan Reinauer]

* Kyösti Mälkki <kyosti.malkki at gmail.com> [140731 21:00]:
> Do you plan to upstream all Chromebook coreboot and libpayload
> branches from Chromium git, or just the individual patches Sage
> finds useful and necessary for the boards You currently work on?
 
No, the plan for now is to only upstream the Chromium HEAD, since all
Chrome OS product branches are derived from that. In theory all changes
made to product branches should all go into Chromium HEAD as well.
While this is not always true, the product branches are now all open on
chromium.org.

> Do we expect the original authors to review the rebased, possibly
> modified work, or is the plan these patches just get rubberstamped
> as +2 by a 3rd party once they build cleanly?

Of course we value the feedback of the original authors.

> I see some of you first patches had a couple commits from Chromium
> tree squashed into one. Why was the approach changed from how eg.
> Aaron and Stefan handled the process?

It was changed due to community feedback.

> This has the unpleasant effect that commit ownership (and eg. git
> blame) will no longer reflect the actual author of change and also git
> log --oneline no longer serves as a datapoint in attempt to compare
> which changes from Chromium branches have been upstreamed or not.

The idea is that we will switch to a new upstream coreboot version ASAP
and get into a continuous upstreaming process where we don't accumulate
such a large number of patches anymore but upstream at least every few
weeks so we can stay closer to upstream coreboot in the future. 

> Did you develop some nice method to keep track of which branches
> from Chromium we can consider as completely upstreamed?

The method will be 

product firmware branches ==> Chrome OS HEAD ==> coreboot upstream

> Do you have the facilities to do regular board-status script runs
> for recent Chromebooks?

Not at this time, but we are constantly working on improving our testing
infrastructure to allow more flexible and broader testing. I hope at
some point we can add that. However, if you rely on stability, you
definitely want to run coreboot off the product firmware branches.

Stefan