Hi, Gerd Hoffmann wrote: > Note that the linux kernel's in-kernel interfaces are explicitly *not* > backward compatible though. .. > I fail to see the problem. seabios is part of the firmware,
So that's important, I hope to help create some understanding: coreboot and SeaBIOS are cleanly separated. This separation compares quite well to the clean separation between Linux kernel and the many applications you mention which depend on kernel APIs. I agree that coreboot should also pull weight to maintain compatibility here, but now and then all the burden falls on payloads. :\ > users are not going to freely mix and match versions. You do recognize that this is a self-fulfilling prophecy, I hope? They're certainly not going to do it if it was made impossible! > So if you are stuck with an old coreboot version for whatever reason, > just continue using an old seabios version. I find that attitude absolutely obnoxious, which is why I question whether SeaBIOS indeed wants to proceed with such an offensive change. Boards are removed from coreboot in most every release so "getting stuck" is a real thing. Announcing a deprecation flag day in the next SeaBIOS release to give people not reading every patch on this list an opportunity to engage is an easy ask. Why the rush? > It's not like seabios does see heavy development, and the changes > going in are mostly for new hardware support (recent example is nvme) > which doesn't buy you much on old machines. This just sounds like privilege, especially given Volker's recent threading/interrupt bugfix. That's a perfect example of a significant improvement which should be available also with older coreboot. Could of course create some SeaBIOS branches for backports and release master to move fast and break stuff, but I don't think that's the best option here. > > Firmware is not QEMU. > > Note that coreboot apparently considers 5 years of backward > compatibility enough. They supported both old and new method > for finding cbfs that long. Do you mean within the coreboot codebase? I agree with you if you suggest that coreboot should not remove backwards compatibility in the payload interface willy-nilly! But I assume that's off the table, so SeaBIOS can only decide how it wants to behave. //Peter _______________________________________________ SeaBIOS mailing list -- seabios@seabios.org To unsubscribe send an email to seabios-le...@seabios.org
