coreboot Release Process

This document describes our release process and all prerequisites to implement it successfully.

Purpose of coreboot releases

Our releases aren’t primarily a vehicle for code that is stable across all boards: The logistics of testing the more than 100 boards that are spread out all continents (except Antarctica, probably) on a given tree state are prohibitive for project of our size.

Instead, the releases are regular breakpoints that serve multiple purposes: They support cooperation between multiple groups (corporations or otherwise) in that it’s easier to keep source trees synchronized based on a limited set of commits. They allow a quick assessment of the age of any given build or source tree based on its git version (4.8-1234 was merged into master a few months after 4.8, which came out in April of 2018. 4.0-21718’s age is harder to guess).

And finally we use releases to as points in time where we remove old code: Once we decide that a certain part of coreboot gets in the way of future development, we announce on the next release that we intend to remove that part - and everything that depends on it - after the following release. So removing feature FOO will be announced in release X for release X+1. The first commit after X+1 is fair game for such removal.

Together with our 3 months release horizon, this provides time to plan any migrations necessary to keep older boards in the tree by bringing them up to current standards.

coreboot release team

To avoid issues of blocking the release on a single person, a release team has been formed. Please see the COREBOOT RELEASES section of the MAINTAINERS file for the current members.

These individuals work together to make sure releases are done on time, follow the steps of this document, and update the release processes and scripts.

Needed credentials & authorizations

coreboot admins only

  • Website access is required to post the release files to the website.

All release team members

  • IRC topic access is required to update the topic.

  • Git access rights are needed to post the tag.

  • Blog post access is needed to do the blog post.

  • A PGP key is required to sign the release tarballs and git tag.

Most of the steps in the release process can be done by anyone on the release team. Only adding the files to the website needs to be done by a coreboot administrator.

When to release

Releases are done roughly on a 3-month schedule. If a release is delayed, the next release will still be 3 months after the last release.

Checklist

~6 weeks prior to release

  • [ ] Announce upcoming release to mailing list, ask people to test and to update release notes.

  • [ ] Start marking patches that should to go into the release with a tag “coreboot_release_X.yy”.

~4 weeks prior to release

  • [ ] Freeze toolchain state. Only relevant fixes are allowed from this point on.

  • [ ] Schedule release meetings.

~2 weeks prior to release

  • [ ] Meet with release team.

  • [ ] Send reminder email to mailing list, ask for people to test, and to update the release notes.

  • [ ] Update the topic in the IRC channel with the date of the upcoming release.

~1 week prior to release

  • [ ] Meet with release team.

  • [ ] Send reminder email to mailing list, ask for people to test, and to update the release notes.

  • [ ] Update the topic in the IRC channel with the date of the upcoming release.

  • [ ] If there are any deprecations announced for the following release, make sure that a list of currently affected boards and chipsets is part of the release notes.

  • [ ] Finalize release notes as much as possible.

  • [ ] Prepare release notes template for following release.

  • [ ] Update `Documentation/releases/index.md.

  • [ ] Check which branches need to be released. Any branch with changes should get a new release. Announce these branch releases and prepare release notes.

Day before release tag

  • [ ] Make sure patches with tags for the release are merged.

  • [ ] Announce to IRC that the release will be tomorrow and ask for testing.

  • [ ] Run util/vboot_list/vboot_list.sh script to update the list of boards supported by vboot.

Day of release tag

  • [ ] Meet with release team.

  • [ ] Review the full documentation about doing the release below.

  • [ ] Select a commit ID to base the release upon.

  • [ ] Test the commit selected for release.

  • [ ] Submit last pre-release release notes.

  • [ ] Run the release script.

  • [ ] Test the release from the actual release tarballs.

  • [ ] Push signed Tag to repo. This is the actual release step. Once this patch is pushed, the release itself has been done. everything after this step is packaging and delivering the release.

  • [ ] Announce that the release tag is done on IRC.

  • [ ] Update the topic in the IRC channel that the release is done.

  • [ ] Do the final release notes - Fill in the release date, remove “Upcoming release” and other filler from the current release notes.

  • [ ] ADMIN: Upload release files to web server.

  • [ ] ADMIN: Upload the final release notes to the web server.

  • [ ] ADMIN: Upload crossgcc sources to web server.

  • [ ] Create coreboot-sdk and coreboot-jenkins-node docker images based on the release ID and push them to dockerhub. These can be used as release builders.

Week following the release

  • [ ] Do the final release notes - Fill in the release date, remove “Upcoming release” and other filler from the current release notes.

  • [ ] ADMIN: Upload release files & toolchain tarballs to the web server.

  • [ ] ADMIN: Upload the final release notes to the web server.

  • [ ] ADMIN: Upload crossgcc sources to the web server.

  • [ ] Create coreboot-sdk and coreboot-jenkins-node docker images based on the release ID and push them to dockerhub. These can be used as release builders.

  • [ ] Update download page to point to files, push to repo.

  • [ ] Remove code that was announced it was going to be removed.

  • [ ] Update AUTHORS file with any new authors.

  • [ ] Update Documentation/releases/boards_supported_on_branches.md.

7 days after release tag

  • [ ] Meet with release team.

  • [ ] Write and publish blog post with release final notes. Branch releases notes (if any) should be included in the same post.

  • [ ] Set up for next release.

Creating a branch

  • [ ] Branches are named 4.xx_branch to differentiate from the tags. Instructions on creating branches are listed below.

Pre-Release tasks

Announce the upcoming release to the mailing list release 2 weeks ahead of the planned release date.

The announcement should state the planned release date, point to the release notes that are in the making and ask people to test the hardware they have to make sure it’s working with the current master branch, from which the release will ultimately be derived from.

People should be encouraged to provide additions to the release notes.

The final release notes will reside in coreboot’s Documentation/releases directory, so asking for additions to that through the regular Gerrit process works as well. Note that git requires lots of conflict resolution on heavily edited text files though.

Frequently, we will want to wait until particular things are in the release. Once those are in, you can select the commit ID that you want to use for your release. For the 4.6 release, we waited until we had time to do the release, then pulled in a few patches that we wanted to have in the release. The release was based on the final of those patches to be pulled in.

When a release candidate has been selected, announce the commit ID to the #coreboot IRC channel, and request that it get some testing, just to make sure that everything is sane.

Generate the release

After the commit for the release has been selected and verified, run the release script - util/release/build-release. This will download a new tree, checkout the commit that you specified, download the submodules, create a tag, then generate and sign the tarballs.

Be prepared to type in your PGP key’s passphrase.

usage: util/release/build-release <version> [commit id] [username] [gpg key id]
Tags a new coreboot version and creates a tar archive

version:    New version name to tag the tree with
commit id:  check out this commit-id after cloning the coreboot tree
username:   clone the tree using ssh://USERNAME - defaults to https://
gpg key id: used to tag the version, and generate a gpg signature

After running the script, you should have a new directory for the release, along with 4 files: 2 tarballs, and 2 signature files.

drwxr-xr-x   9 martin martin      4096 Apr 30 19:57 coreboot-4.6
-rw-r--r--   1 martin martin  29156788 Apr 30 19:58 coreboot-4.6.tar.xz
-rw-r--r--   1 martin martin       836 Apr 30 19:58 coreboot-4.6.tar.xz.sig
-rw-r--r--   1 martin martin   5902076 Apr 30 19:58 coreboot-blobs-4.6.tar.xz
-rw-r--r--   1 martin martin       836 Apr 30 19:58 coreboot-blobs-4.6.tar.xz.sig

Here’s the command that was used to generate the 4.6 release:

util/release/build-release 4.6 db508565 Gaumless 3E4F7DF7

Test the release from the tarballs

  • Run “make what-jenkins-does” and verify that everything is building.

  • Build and test qemu

cp configs/config.emulation_qemu_x86_i440fx .config
make olddefconfig
make
qemu-system-x86_64 -bios build/coreboot.rom -serial stdio

  • Build and test any other platforms you can.

  • Compare the directory from the tarballs to the coreboot repo to make sure nothing went wrong.

  • Push the tag to git

A good tag will look like this:

% git show 4.6
tag 4.6
Tagger: Martin Roth <martinroth@google.com>
Date:   Sun Apr 30 19:48:38 2017 -0600

coreboot version 4.6
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1

iQIcBAABCQAGBQJZBpP2AAoJEBl5bCs+T333xfgQAKhilfDTzqlr3MLJC4VChbmr
...
678e0NzyWsyqU1Vx2rdFdLANx6hghH1R7E5ybzHHUQrhb55BoEsnQMU1oS0npnT4
dwfLho1afk0ZLPUU1JFW
=25y8
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

commit db508565d2483394b709654c57533e55eebace51 (HEAD, tag: 4.6, origin/master, origin/HEAD)
...

Push the signed tag

When you used the script to generate the release, a signed tag was generated in the tree that was downloaded. From the coreboot-X.Y tree, just run: git push origin X.Y. In case you pushed the wrong tag already, you have to force push the new one.

You will need write access for tags to the coreboot git repo to do this.

After the release is tagged in git

Announce that the release has been tagged - this lets people know that they should update their trees to grab the new tag. Until they do this, the version number in build.h will still be based on the previous tag.

Copy the tarballs and .sig files generated by the script to the coreboot server, and put them in the release directory at /srv/docker/www.coreboot.org-staticfiles/releases/

# Update the sha256sum file
sha256sum -b coreboot-*.tar.xz > sha256suma.txt

# make sure the two new files are present (and nothing else has changed)
diff sha256sum.txt sha256suma.txt

mv sha256suma.txt sha256sum.txt

People can now see the release tarballs on the website at https://www.coreboot.org/releases/

The downloads page is the official place to download the releases from, and it needs to be updated with links to the new release tarballs and .sig files. It can be found at: https://review.coreboot.org/cgit/homepage.git/tree/downloads.html

Here is an example commit to change it: https://review.coreboot.org/c/homepage/+/19515

Upload crossgcc sources

Sometimes the source files for older revisions of crossgcc disappear. To deal with that we maintain a mirror at https://www.coreboot.org/releases/crossgcc-sources/ where we host the sources used by the crossgcc scripts that are part of coreboot releases.

Run

util/crossgcc/buildgcc -u

This will output the set of URLs that the script uses to download the sources. Download them yourself and copy them into the crossgcc-sources directory on the server.

After the release is complete

Post the final release notes on https://blogs.coreboot.org

Making a branch

At times we will need to create a branch, generally for patch fixes. When making a branch, do NOT name it the same as the release tag: X.Y - this creates trouble when trying to check it out, as git can’t tell whether you want the tag or the branch. Instead, name it X.Y_branch:

git checkout 4.8
git checkout -b 4.8_branch
git push origin 4.8_branch

You can then cherry-pick changes and push them up to the branch:

git cherry-pick c6d134988c856d0025153fb885045d995bc8c397
git push origin HEAD:refs/for/4.8_branch