>> Whenever I want a build without vboot I get really annoyed about this
>> hardcoded dependency, even when vboot is disabled in Kconfig.
>>
>> Would a patch to make the dependency conditional on Kconfig get accepted?
>
> I should hope so, though I recommend starting a new thread to see if experts 
> on vboot can chime in and explain why this is or isn't a good idea.

vboot is used for more than just boot verification these days, we use
it as a sort of generic crypto toolbox for all of coreboot's crypto
needs (because it wouldn't make sense to implement, say, SHA-256
algorithms twice). For host utilities in particular, some of these are
needed in cbfstool (e.g. for the --hash-algorithm parameter to add a
hash attribute to a file), and there is no Kconfig cbfstool so you
can't just configure it out if you don't need it.

I don't think it's fair to single in on vboot as the big problem here.
We vboot developers are definitely not trying to make this hard or
obnoxious for anyone, and while it is hosted in a separate upstream
everyone is welcome to submit patches to that just like you can do to
coreboot (e.g. Idwer submitted some stuff to fix compilation under
FreeBSD recently) and I'll do what I can to help get them landed. But
none of these problems are really vboot-specific -- the situation is
just that there is no official toolchain for coreboot host utilities,
and the only testing we have is for exactly what Jenkins uses (which I
believe is the same thing used for crossgcc? +Patrick to keep me
honest). Anyone can land a patch that uses a GCC 8+-only feature in
cbfstool just as well as in vboot and it will cause exactly the same
problem.

So I think the "official" rule is basically that the minimum
requirement for host utilities is the same compiler and version that
crossgcc uses, which I think makes some amount of sense (otherwise
we'll just have to keep tracking and deploying two separate versions).
If you guys want to change that we can have that discussion, but
whatever we decide it's probably not going to be a very effective
decision unless someone puts in the work to really make Jenkins test
that continuously. And either way, I don't think any of this is
vboot's fault in particular (vboot uprevs are tested by Jenkins just
as much as any other patch and have to pass any compatibility tests
enforced there).
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