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Librecore: Aiming to be a Better Libre Spin of Coreboot

posted by martyb on Tuesday January 24 2017, @06:53PM   Printer-friendly
from the making-a-better-'puter-booter dept.

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

Michael Larabel reports via Phoronix

Librecore is a new project aiming to be a new Coreboot downstream with a focus remaining on providing fully-free system firmware. Separately, Minifree/Libreboot has been accused (and admitted by Leah Rowe) to not paying a vendor for a completed contract.

Librecore was formed due to "[Libreboot lead developer Leah Rowe] alienating large portions of the community, plus the stagnant and hard to use libreboot firmware and build system." With Librecore, they are aiming to use industry-standard tools and build environments. Another different design decision is pursuing Petitboot as the payload for a more modern and useful interface over GRUB as a payload.

[An] email from [Timothy Pearson of Raptor Engineering, one of the developers involved with the formation of Librecore, says]

We strongly recommend that no person do any business with Minifree or its founder Leah Rowe, as they do not honor their legally binding contracts.

The author notes that Rowe sent him an email that attempts damage control while admitting that she gyped Pearson.

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 25 2017, @06:08AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 25 2017, @06:08AM (#458396)

    Hi Michael,

    I'm perfectly happy for Raptor to publicly complain. This is only fair, and they have the right. However, there are certain facts that I would like to point out clearly for the community. Some facts for you to include on http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...core-Formation [phoronix.com]

    Fact 1: I paid 100% of the KGPE-D16 contract with was 75k USD I did not pay the KCMA-D8 contract which was 15k. Please can you add this information to the article, because right now the article implies that I barely paid any of it. The D8 was a mere extension on top of the D16 and was a few weeks work for Timothy. The article also implies that I was unwilling to pay the remaining 15k. I was actually *unable* to pay. Big difference.

    I fully paid for the KGPE-D16 contract, and D16 is all that Minifree sells. Most people don't use D8 and it wasn't viable to sell. I would also like to point out that several organisations now use the KGPE-D16 with libreboot. This includes the Free Software Foundation, to host their websites. I personally sacrificed a lot to pull that off. I find it deeply insulting that Timothy causes all this fuss about the D8. The D8 port was also missold to me. I was lead to believe that the hardware was readily available when it wasn't (unlike D16 hardware), so the work for the D8 was more or less a waste of resources.

    Fact 2: Libreboot is not a dead project. We are currently working on a new release behind the scenes. We've merged an entirely new build system that was written from scratch, to replace the old one (the one that is "stagnant and hard to use" according to the article). It's in the libreboot git repository as I speak, it was merged a few days ago. Please mention this. The new build system is extremely modern, flexible and easy to use. It adds many features which the old build system lacked, such as (but certainly not limited to):

    • easy ability to build and integrate linux kernel payloads (*hint* petitboot *hint*)
    • integrates all chromebook-related utils, for rockchip ARM chromebooks
    • integrates chromeos flashrom, in addition to upstream flashrom
    • generally better design, more modular, easier to maintain, easier to build
    • plus a whole host of other advantages
    • about 10 new chromebooks have been added to libreboot.

    So much for libreboot being dead, eh? Please also mention that Libreboot is actually abandoning coreboot and will be using Librecore as upstream. This will be covered in my upcoming FOSDEM talk too. We have been quite public about this already, on the Libreboot bug tracker. I would also like to point out, that so far Raptor Engineering has not fixed the bug on KGPE-D16 where above 128GiB RAM becomes unstable to the point of being unusable. Only up to 128GiB works. This is less than what the contract suggests. They also released source code that was broken; memory initialization was broken on most memory modules. It took 6 months after the initial release of the KGPE-D16 source code for them to make memory initialization work, and even now raminit only works with a few modules. This is in addition to other bugs which they haven't fixed. I also have IRC logs of private conversations between me and Timothy, where he states that he's willing to let the free/libre hardware movement crash and burn. This was before the dispute that happened today regarding payment.

    -- Leah Rowe

    - Librecore: Aiming To Be A Better Libre Spin Of Coreboot #10 [phoronix.com]

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 25 2017, @08:14AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 25 2017, @08:14AM (#458420)

    With the toxic personality associated with it, one wonders if this project will be the next OpenOffice.org, where the devs jump ship en mass to work on the fork.

    -- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]

    • (Score: 2) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Wednesday January 25 2017, @08:18PM

      by Scruffy Beard 2 (6030) on Wednesday January 25 2017, @08:18PM (#458634)

      From what I have read, her personality does not seem that toxic.

      Apparently, the GNU project finally gave up ownership of Libreboot when all of (or at least most) the developers followed her.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 26 2017, @01:23AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 26 2017, @01:23AM (#458768)

        She wants to be a dictator.
        ...and, to my understanding, not the benevolent kind.
        See the comment by FatPhil, above. [soylentnews.org]

        -- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]