coreboot changelog

This changelog covers the week up to November 8th, spanning 63 commits (f6dc544..8bd1c36).

Last week’s code submissions gave us a lot of improvements pretty much everywhere, but the most user-visible change is probably the addition of ACPI S3 support to asrock/e350m1.

Speaking of ACPI, support for the DMAR tables used to report Intel IOMMU (VT-d) information to the operating system was significantly improved and is enabled on Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge.

Another user visible change is the rework of the fallback mechanism in our bootblock, making its CMOS-backed state handling more robust.

cbmem also saw some changes in that all its entries are now listed separately in cbtables (and util/cbmem uses that new structure) to cut down on what coreboot exposes as interface.

On the architectures side, ARM64 dropped its sec(urity) mon(itor) code in favor of using ARM Ltd’s Open Source arm-trusted-firmware, which we already import in 3rdparty.

The integration of commits to support AMD Fam15h CPUs with a non-AGESA implementation that integrates better with coreboot saw some progress. The AMD Binary PI side saw a number of bug fixes, too.

Boards based on Intel’s Skylake architecture also saw more development.

In addition to these targetted developments, there was also the usual set of bug fixes across the entire tree, providing some cleanups to the code and configuration system, some portability fixes for Windows and Mac OS X, deduplication of ACPI table generation on i945, and the removal of a Super IO that wasn’t used by any board (and thus isn’t even build tested).

The USB device mode driver in libpayload for the DesignWare USB2 controller works better under debugging, while the XHCI USB3 host controller driver gained a workaround for Intel XHCI controllers.

Finally, the board-status scripts that parse boot success reports into the list of supported motherboards on the wiki were modified to point out more clearly that the list on the wiki describes the current status. This became necessary because some users assumed that it’s outdated.
Since the i440bx mainboards that were at the top of the list may have contributed to that impression, desktop boards were moved down in favor of notebooks and server boards where most of the current development happens.