This covers commits 6cb3a59 (which is the 4.1 tag) up to commit 406effd5
This week brought the addition of one new chipset and four new mainboards: Welcome the Intel Skylake SoC, and the new mainboards google/cyan, intel/kunimitsu, intel/sklrvp, and intel/strago, which are Braswell or Skylake based.
As for tools, the script that generated the 4.1 release was added to the tree. To aid with debugging build issues, buildgcc shows the URLs it uses to download the sources to the toolchain. The standard git hook now uses a customized version of Linux’s checkpatch.pl utility for better coding style compliance tests. The cbmem utility gained OpenBSD compatibility when reading timestamps.
The USB host drivers in libpayload saw improvements both for USB3, supporting SuperSpeed hubs and showing more robustness in the presence of strangely behaving USB devices, and for DWC2 controllers, which now support LowSpeed devices behind HighSpeed hubs. coreboot also passes more information to libpayload on where to find the flash part as well as the parameters of the CBFS that was used during boot.
The CBFS format is seeing new development: The default alignment for files is now hardcoded to 64 bytes, which was already the default. There are no known instances where this value was changed, and it simplifies development going forward. The change is forward compatible in that old users can still read new CBFS images. New users run into problems if they work on a CBFS image with a different alignment configuration.
Furthermore there were discussions on how to extend the CBFS format compatibly. So far this led to numerous refactorings in cbfstool to simplify further development.
Finally, there were a whole lot of bug fixes: ARM64, the code for Nvidia’s Tegra210 chipset and the google/foster and google/smaug boards saw lots of development, from making them boot again to various hardware enablement. AMD’s RS780 chipset was effectively disabled due to a typo in the build system. There’s an ongoing effort to bring AMD K8/Fam10h into shape again, which also positively affected HD Audio configuration. CBMEM timestamps are more complete than ever.
There was also the usual bunch of cleanups that get rid of unused Kconfig symbols and configuration options, deal with wrong indentation, and replace magic numbers with meaningful names.
Forcing the CBFS alignment to 64 bytes was a bad idea IMHO. It breaks CBFS layouts where CBFS items are aligned to flash block erase/program boundaries.
The changes only affect the new format (with FMAP as a second-level layout system), the old format with a master header and custom alignment is still fully supported at the moment. The new format intentionally adds FMAP regions as a way to fit to erase blocks which is a much more powerful mechanism (because you can put multiple files into a single erase block / FMAP region, thus wasting way less space than needing a new block per file if some of them will always be written together). Also, you can still always use cbfstool add -b to force a file to a custom offset if necessary.