coreboot changelog Feb 17 – March 1

This changelog covers 105 commits in the two week period between February 17, 2016 and March 1, 2016. (6a622311 – 163506a8)

We’ve entered a lower volume period for patches being submitted, so for a while, blog posts will be every two weeks instead of every week. Once we get above 100 patches a week, blog posts will be weekly again.

Payloads got some attention during this period, adding a way to include additional modules into the GRUB2 build. An option was added to build and include coreinfo as a ‘secondary’ payload, allowing it to be run from another payload. We also added U-Boot as a coreboot payload. This is currently still just in development, and needs additional work before it will act as a generic payload for all platforms.

We added LZ4 compression to the build with runtime decompression for cbfs. LZ4’s speed should be roughly the same as LZMA, trading a smaller compressed size for slightly slower decompressoin. LZ4’s main advantage is that it requires much less memory to do the decompression, allowing for compression of stages that couldn’t previously be compressed.

The suite of board-status scripts got several updates, fixing timestamp handling for the sanitized path names, handling when the script is run as super-user in a better way, and adding a script that will set up a Ubuntu Live-image to allow users to more easily run the board-status script.

In the build tools and utilities, we had some fixes for the toolchain builder, updating the GDB builds for x86_64 and MIPS. A couple of scripts were also added. One utility downloads and extracts binary blobs from Chrome OS recovery images, and the other new script allow easier testing of POST cards.

Intel based boards and chipsets received a large percentage of the patches for the past two weeks:

The Galileo board and Quark chip had several pieces new added, along with additional documentation for those changes. Major pieces done were to set up the basic registers, in the ACPI FADT, setting up the memory map, and enabling the UART.

We received the final set of patches to finish out the changes combining many of the the Intel GPIO initialization routines into a single common set of functions. The autoport script was updated to use the common GPIO functions.

Sandy Bridge / Ivy Bridge memory initialization also continued to receive updates, adding support for XMP profiles in the SPD, updating logging, and fixing some bugs.

Intel’s Skylake chipset and boards were updated to enable Hardware P-state control (HWP) based on Intel’s Speed Shift Technology (SST). Another change to Skylake platforms increased stolen memory for graphics to 64MB.

Intel Bay Trail got a couple of updates, adding a fix for issues with displayport on the FSP version, and adding IOSF access support to the reg_script module.

Intel Apollo Lake had several more foundational pieces added to the codebase. Many more patches for Apollo Lake are expected in the next couple of weeks.

On the non-X86 side, the instructions for running the Arm7 Qemu board were updated, and the memory map was corrected.

RISC-V got a couple of patches, adding additional debugging, and fixing some inline asm code.
The coreboot project would like to recognize another pair of developers who have hit major milestones in the past two weeks:

Lee Leahy just reached his 100th commit merged into coreboot.org. Lee is a developer with Intel who has been working on coreboot for about a year and a half. He has worked on many of the recent intel chipsets, and is currently adding support and documentation for the Intel Galileo board and Quark chips in a way that each step of the process can be tested and verified. While this takes significantly more effort than the typical method of porting, it should result in a better platform.

Tobias Diedrich has just had his 50th patch merged.  Tobias has been contributing patches to coreboot for over five years, and his patches have spanned a number of boards and chipsets.

Finally, please welcome our newest authors:
Andrew Waterman contributed the pair of RISC-V patches.
Joe Pillow added the Chrome OS recovery image script.

coreboot statistics

- Total commits: 105
- Total authors: 25
- Total lines added: 13396
- Total lines removed: -3127
- Total difference: 10269

Added 1 mainboard: emulation/qemu-power8
Added 1 processor: qemu-power8

Submodule updates:
- 3rdparty/arm-trusted-firmware (329 commits)
- 3rdparty/vboot (2 commits)

=== Top Authors - Number of commits ===
Leroy P Leahy                20 (19.048%)
Aaron Durbin                 11 (10.476%)
Patrick Rudolph               8 (7.619%)
Patrick Georgi                8 (7.619%)
Martin Roth                   8 (7.619%)
Stefan Reinauer               5 (4.762%)
Vladimir Serbinenko           5 (4.762%)
Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli        4 (3.810%)
Julius Werner                 4 (3.810%)
Werner Zeh                    4 (3.810%)
Duncan Laurie                 4 (3.810%)
Ronald G. Minnich             4 (3.810%)
Total Authors: 25

=== Top Authors - Lines added ===
Julius Werner              7602 (56.748%)
Leroy P Leahy              1255 (9.368%)
Ronald G. Minnich          1097 (8.189%)
Stefan Reinauer             990 (7.390%)
Werner Zeh                  479 (3.576%)
Patrick Rudolph             406 (3.031%)
Damien Zammit               336 (2.508%)
Martin Roth                 293 (2.187%)
Aaron Durbin                232 (1.732%)
Joseph Pillow               218 (1.627%)

=== Top Authors - Lines removed ===
Stefan Reinauer            1662 (53.150%)
Patrick Rudolph             936 (29.933%)
Julius Werner               154 (4.925%)
Aaron Durbin                128 (4.093%)
Leroy P Leahy                93 (2.974%)
Damien Zammit                21 (0.672%)
Patrick Georgi               20 (0.640%)
Vladimir Serbinenko          17 (0.544%)
Tobias Diedrich              15 (0.480%)
David Hendricks              13 (0.416%)

=== Top Reviewers - Number of patches reviewed ===
Martin Roth                  43 (40.952%)
Stefan Reinauer              33 (31.429%)
Paul Menzel                  30 (28.571%)
Aaron Durbin                 13 (12.381%)
Andrey Petrov                 8 (7.619%)
Furquan Shaikh                8 (7.619%)
Patrick Georgi                6 (5.714%)
Ronald G. Minnich             5 (4.762%)
Timothy Pearson               4 (3.810%)
Patrick Rudolph               3 (2.857%)
Total Reviewers: 18

=== Top Submitters - Number of patches submitted ===
Martin Roth                  40 (38.095%)
Leroy P Leahy                18 (17.143%)
Stefan Reinauer              13 (12.381%)
Patrick Georgi                8 (7.619%)
Aaron Durbin                  8 (7.619%)
Vladimir Serbinenko           5 (4.762%)
Ronald G. Minnich             4 (3.810%)
Julius Werner                 4 (3.810%)
Werner Zeh                    3 (2.857%)
Total Submitters: 11