GSoC [infrastructure] : Along the way, something went terribly wrong

I started working with AMD platforms’ infrastructure with high hopes of being able  to better manage the CBMEM setup. While I have a selection of family14 boards to work with, things did not continue so well:

First off, tree had literally thousands of lines of copy-pasted or misplaced AGESA interface code remaining in the tree. A lot of that should have been caught in the reviews, but it appears a few years back the attitude was that if coreboot project was lucky enough to get some patches from an industry partner, the code must be good (as the development was paid for!) and just got rubber-stamped and committed.

Second, the agreement I have for chipset documentation is not open-source friendly. It contains a clause saying all documentation behind the site login is to be used for internal evaluation only. I was well aware of this at the beginning of GSoC and at that time I expected my mentor organisation would be able to get me in contact with right people at AMD to get this fixed. But that never happened. I am also concerned of the little amount of feedback received as essentially nobody in community has fam16kb to test.

So currently I am balancing which parts of my work on AGESA I should and can publish and what I cannot. Furthermore, first evidences that vendor has decided to withdraw from releasing  AGESA sources have appeared for review. In practice there has been zero communication with the coreboot community on this so I anticipate the mistakes that were done with FSP binary blobs will get repeated.

Needless to say the impact this has had on my motivation to further work on AGESA as my efforts are likely to go wasted with any new boards using blobs. I guess this leaves pleanty of opportunities for future positive surprises once we have things like complete timestamps, CBMEM and USBDEBUG consoles and generally any working debug output from AGESA implemented. I attempted to initiate communication around these topics already in fall 2013 without success and it is sad to see the communications between different parties interested in overall tree maintenance have not improved at all since then.