The 4.19 release is planned for the 15th of January 2023.
Since the last release, the coreboot project has merged almost 1500 commits from over 150 authors. Of those authors, more than 20 were first-time committers to the coreboot project.
As always, we are very grateful to all of the contributors for helping to keep the project going. The coreboot project is different from many open source projects in that we need to keep constantly updating the codebase to stay relevant with the latest processors and technologies. It takes constant effort to just stay afloat, let alone improve the codebase. Thank you very much to everyone who has contributed, both in this release and in previous times.
Update this document with changes that should be in the release notes.
The coreboot build system automatically adds a 'config' file to CBFS that lists the exact Kconfig configuration that the image was built with. This is useful to reproduce a build after the fact or to check whether support for a specific feature is enabled in the image.
This file has been generated using the 'savedefconfig' Kconfig command, which generates the minimal .config file that is needed to produce the required config in a coreboot build. This is fine for reproduction, but bad when you want to check if a certain config was enabled, since many options get enabled by default or pulled in through another option's 'select' statement and thus don't show up in the defconfig.
Instead coreboot now includes a larger .config instead. In order to save some space, all of the comments disabling options are removed from the file, except for those included in the defconfig.
We can also LZMA compress the file since it is never read by firmware itself and only intended for later re-extraction via cbfstool, which always has LZMA support included.
Intel Icelake is unmaintained and the only user of this platform ever was the Intel CRB (Customer Reference Board). From the looks of the code, it was never ready for production as only engineering sample CPUIDs are supported.
Intel Icelake code will be removed with release 4.19 and any maintenence will be done on the 4.19 branch. This consists of the Intel Icelake SoC and Intel Icelake RVP mainboard.
The SoC Intel Quark is unmaintained and different efforts to revive it failed. Also, the only user of this platform ever was the Galileo board.
Thus, to reduce the maintanence overhead for the community, support for the following components will be removed from the master branch and will be maintained on the release 4.20 branch.