coreboot changelog

This report covers commits b66d673..d98471c, the week up to Sunday, 2015-10-18

This week has an interesting distribution in its commits: A few very large and impactful commits (and commit sets), but otherwise lots of tiny little things. The last months typically saw more cohesive changes each week, affecting a small number of subsystems or drivers – but not this week.

The biggest item in terms of code size was the reintroduction of Intel’s Rangeley SoC and related mainboard, which were found to still be requested by users after all.

The biggest item in terms of impact was probably the improvement of our automated build testing by adding our lint tests and build tests for various utilities to our build infrastructure, reporting any errors (and preventing them from creeping into the master branch). We don’t test all tools yet, but adding the others should be painless now. libpayload also gained a new test configuration so both libcurses implementations are now covered.

The vboot verstage concept was ported to x86 and added to FSP 1.1, allowing a separate verification stage to check romstage before executing it (from a potentially unsafe location).

AMD microcode can now be loaded from CBFS, and using their standard format instead of a custom layout that was used by coreboot until now.

Apart from these, changes happened all across the tree:
SMBIOS tables report memory vendors; ACPI was cleaned up to work better with new ACPI compiler versions; there’s better reporting for MTRR configurations, and related macros have more sensible names; the ARMv7 code avoids miscompilation with gcc-5.2, which is significant because that’s our standard compiler version; Intel GMA ACPI saw improvements; there were tons of style fixes in preparation to deal with the addition of lint tests to the automated tests; cbfstool can now add files after files of the same name were removed from an image; the coreinfo payload has the sense to reboot after it’s done; the cbmem utility is more robust, and several more cleanups and bugfixes.