WIP: Reworked contrib.md (deleting name of a previous project)

2023-08-29 16:23:39 +02:00 · 2023-08-29 16:23:39 +02:00 · 67c4d5ad6b
parent 5b58977b5e
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--- a/site/contrib.md
+++ b/site/contrib.md
@ -13,255 +13,86 @@ entry)
 Information about who maintains GNU Boot, and how the project is run,
 can be found on this page: [git.md](git.md).
-You can know the history of the Libreboot project, simply by reading this page.
+You can know the history of the GNU Boot project, simply by reading this page.
-It goes into detail about all of the major contributions to the project, and in
+It goes into detail about all of the major contributions to the project.
 general how the project was created (and who helped create it).
 Leah Rowe
 ---------
 **Founder of the Libreboot project, and currently the lead developer.** Leah
 works on all aspects of Libreboot, such as:
 * General management. Leah handles all outside contributions to Libreboot,
  reviews pull requests, deals with bug reports, delegates tasks when necessary
  or desirable. Leah controls the libreboot.srht.site server infrastructure, hosted
  in her lab (of course it runs Libreboot!)
 * Leah has the final say on all decisions, taking input via discussion with
  members of the public, mostly on IRC. Leah oversees releases of Libreboot,
  and generally keeps the project going. Without Leah, there would be no Libreboot!
 * The build system (lbmk, short for Libreboot Make). This is the automated build
  system that sits at the heart of Libreboot; it downloads, patches, configures
  and compiles the relevant components like coreboot, GNU GRUB and generates
  the Libreboot ROM images that you can find in release archives.
 * Upstream work on coreboot, when necessary (and other projects that Libreboot
  uses). This means also working with people from outside of the Libreboot
  project, to get patches merged (among other things) on the upstream projects
  that Libreboot uses
 * Providing user support on IRC
 * *Commercial* user support via her company listed
  on [the suppliers page](/suppliers.md)
 Leah is also responsible for [osboot.org](https://osboot.org/) which is heavily
 based on Libreboot, but with different project goals.
 Other people are listed below, in alphabetical order:
 Alyssa Rosenzweig
 -----------------
 Switched the website to use markdown in lieu of handwritten HTML and custom
-PHP. **Former libreboot project maintainer (sysadmin for libreboot.srht.site).**
+PHP.
 Alyssa wrote the original static site generator (bash scripts converting
-markdown to html, via pandoc) for libreboot.srht.site. This static site generator has
+markdown to html, via pandoc) that was forked into a formal project, by Leah Rowe:
 now been heavily modified and forked into a formal project, by Leah Rowe:
-<https://untitled.vimuser.org/> (untitled is Leah's work, not Alyssa's, but it's based on
+<https://untitled.vimuser.org/>
 Alyssa's original work on the static site generator that Libreboot used to use;
 the Libreboot website is now built with Untitled)
 Andrew Robbins
 --------------
-Worked on large parts of Libreboot's old build system and related documentation.
+Worked on large parts of a more older build system and related documentation.
 Andrew joined the Libreboot project as a full time developer during June 2017,
 until his departure in March 2021.
 I, Leah Rowe, am very grateful to Andrew Robbins for his numerous contributions
 over the years.
 Arthur Heymans
 --------------
-Merged a patch from coreboot into libreboot, enabling C3 and C4 power
+Merged a patch from coreboot, enabling C3 and C4 power states to work correctly
-states to work correctly on GM45 laptops. This was a long-standing issue
+on GM45 laptops. This was a long-standing issue before Athur's contribution.
-before Athur's contribution. Arthur also fixed VRAM size on i945 on
+Arthur also fixed VRAM size on i945 on GM45 systems, allowing maximum VRAM
-GM45 systems, allowing maximum VRAM allocation for the onboard GPUs on
+allocation for the onboard GPUs on these systems, another longstanding issue.
 these systems, another longstanding issue in libreboot.
-Arthur also did work on the Libreboot build system, when he was a member of the
+Arthur also did work on the build system, when he was a member of the
-project. He still works on coreboot, to this day, and Libreboot greatly
+project. He still works on coreboot, to this day, and we greatly
-benefits from his work. His contributions to the coreboot project, and Libreboot,
+benefits from his work. His contributions to the coreboot project are invaluable.
 are invaluable.
 Damien Zammit
 -------------
 Maintains the Gigabyte GA-G41M-ES2L coreboot port, which is integrated
-in libreboot. Also works on other hardware for the benefit of the
+in GNU Boot. Also works on other hardware for the benefit of the project.
 libreboot project.
 Damien didn't work directly on Libreboot itself, but he worked heavily with
 Leah Rowe, integrating patches and new board ports into Libreboot, based on
 Damien's upstream work on coreboot.
 Denis Carikli
 -------------
 Based on the work done by Peter Stuge, Vladimir Serbineko and others in
 the coreboot project, got native graphics initialization to work on the
-ThinkPad X60, allowing it to be supported in libreboot. Denis gave
+ThinkPad X60, allowing it to be supported in GNU Boot. Also he helped about 
-a lot of advice and helped found the libreboot project.
+many different issues with valuable council, e.g. Intel GPUs backlight control.
 Denis was a mentor to Leah Rowe in the early days, when she founded the
 Libreboot project. A lot of the decision decisions taken, especially with the
 Libreboot build system (lbmk), were inspired from talks with Denis.
 Denis taught Leah about registers used by Intel GPUs for backlight control. In
 the early days, the ThinkPad X60 and T60 laptops in Libreboot did not have
 backlight control working, so the brightness was always 100%. With Denis's help,
 Leah was able to get backlight controls working by reverse engineering the
 correct values to write in those registers. Based on this, a simple fix was
 written in coreboot; however, the fix just wrote directly to the register and
 didn't work with ACPI based brightness controls. Others in coreboot later
 improved it, making ACPI-based backlight controls work properly, based on this
 earlier work.
 Jeroen Quint
 ------------
-Contributed several fixes to the libreboot documentation, relating to
+Contributed several fixes to the documentation, relating to installing Parabola 
-installing Parabola with full disk encryption on libreboot systems.
+with full disk encryption.
 Joshua Gay
 ----------
 Joshua is former FSF staff.
 Joshua helped with the early founding of the Libreboot project, in his capacity
 (at that time) as the FSF's licensing and compliance manager. It was his job to
 review products sent into to the FSF for review; the FSF has a certification
 program called *Respects Your Freedom* (RYF) where the FSF will promote your
 company's products if it comes with all Free Software.
 I, Leah Rowe, was initially just selling ThinkPad X60 laptops with regular
 coreboot on them, and this included CPU microcode updates. At the time, I didn't
 think much of that. Joshua contacted me, in his capacity at the FSF, and asked
 if I would be interested in the FSF's RYF program; I was very surprised that the
 FSF would take me seriously, and I said yes. This is what started the early
 work on Libreboot. Joshua showed me all the problems my products had, and from
 that, the solution was clear:
 A project needed to exist, providing a fully free version of coreboot, without
 any binary blobs. At the time (and this is still true today), coreboot was not
 entirely free software and shipped with binary blobs by default. In particular,
 CPU microcode updates were included by default, on all x86 machines. Working
 with Joshua who reviewed my work, I created a fully free version of coreboot.
 At first, it wasn't called Libreboot, and the work was purely intended for my
 company (at that time called Gluglug) to be promoted by the FSF.
 Joshua used his media connections at the FSF to heavily promote my work, and
 on December 13th, 2013, the Libreboot project was born (but not called that).
 Joshua made sure that everyone knew what I was doing!
 A few months later, the name *Libreboot* was coined, and the domain name
 *libreboot.srht.site* was registered. At that point, the Libreboot project (in early
 2014) was officially born. Once again, Joshua provided every bit of help he
 could, heavily promoting the project and he even wrote this article on the FSF
 website, announcing it:
 <https://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/replace-your-proprietary-bios-with-libreboot>
 Klemens Nanni
 -------------
-Made many fixes and improvements to the GRUB configuration used in
+Made many fixes and improvements to the GRUB configuration used, and several
-libreboot, and several tweaks to the build system.
+tweaks to the build system.
 Leah Rowe initially helped Klemens get his project, autoboot, off the ground.
 Autoboot (website autoboot.org) is no longer online, but was a fork of Libreboot
 with different project goals; in late 2020, Leah Rowe decided to create her
 own new fork of Libreboot called *osboot*, heavily inspired by Klemens's earlier
 work. See: <https://osboot.org/>
-The following is an archive of autoboot.org, from when it was online back in
+Leah Rowe
-2016: <http://web.archive.org/web/20160414205513/http://autoboot.org/> (the
+---------
 autoboot website went offline a few months later, after Klemens abandoned the
 project)
 Lisa Marie Maginnis
 -------------------
 Lisa is a former sysadmin at the Free Software Foundation. In the early days of
 the project, she provided Leah with a lot of technical advice. She initially
 created Libreboot IRC channel, when Leah did not know how to
 use IRC, and also handed +F founder status to Leah for the channel. As an FSF
 sysadmin, it was Lisa's job to maintain a lot of the infrastructure used by
 Libreboot; at the time, mailing lists on the GNU Savannah website were used by
 the Libreboot project. Lisa was also the one who originally encouraged Leah to
 have Libreboot join the GNU project (a decision that was later, rather
 regrettably, reversed). When Paul Kocialkowski was a member of the project in
 2016, she helped him get help from the FSF; he was the leader of the Replicant
 project at the time, which had funding from the FSF, and the FSF authorized him
 to use some of that funding for his work on Libreboot, thanks to Lisa's
 encouragement while she worked at the FSF.
 Lisa also stepped in when Leah Rowe missed her LibrePlanet 2016 talk. Leah was
 scheduled to do a talk about Libreboot, but didn't show up in time. Lisa, along
 with Patrick McDermott (former Libreboot developer, who was present at that
 conference) did the talk in Leah's place. The talk was never recorded, but the
 Free Software Foundation has these photos of that talk on their LibrePlanet
 website (the woman with the blue hair is Lisa, and the long-haired dude with the
 moustache is Patrick):
 <https://media.libreplanet.org/u/libreplanet/m/session-02-c-mws-png-libreplanet-2016-sessions/>
 (archive link: <http://web.archive.org/web/20170319043913/https://media.libreplanet.org/u/libreplanet/m/session-02-c-mws-png-libreplanet-2016-sessions/>)
 <https://media.libreplanet.org/u/libreplanet/m/session-02-c-wide-png-libreplanet-2016-sessions/>
 (archive link: <http://web.archive.org/web/20170319043915/https://media.libreplanet.org/u/libreplanet/m/session-02-c-wide-png-libreplanet-2016-sessions/>)
 Fun fact: Patrick is also the lead developer of ProteanOS, an FSF-endorsed
 embedded OS project: <http://proteanos.com/> (uses BusyBox and Linux-libre)
 Leah Rowe ran *2* LibrePlanet workshops; one in 2015 and another in 2016, while
 visiting Boston, MA, USA on both occasions to attend these conferences. These
 workshops were for Libreboot installations. People came to both workshops, to
 have Libreboot installed onto their computers. As FSF sysadmin, at that time,
 Lisa provided all of the infrastructure and equipment used at those workshops.
 Without her help, those workshops would have not been possible.
 When the ASUS KGPE-D16 mainboard (high-end server board) was ported to Libreboot,
 Leah, working with Timothy Pearson (the one who ported it), shared patches back
 and forth with Lisa around mid 2016, mostly raminit patches, to get the board
 running at the FSF offices. This work ultimately lead to a most wonderful
 achievement:
 The <https://www.gnu.org/> and <https://www.fsf.org/> websites now run on
 Librebooted ASUS KGPE-D16 based servers, on a fully free GNU+Linux distro. This
 means that the FSF now has full software freedom for their hosting infrastructure.
 The FSF also provides access to this infrastructure for many other projects
 (besides GNU projects); for example, Trisquel uses a D16 provided by the FSF
 for their development server used for building Trisquel releases and testing
 changes to the Trisquel GNU+Linux distribution. Trisquel is a fully free
 GNU+Linux distribution, heavily promoted by the FSF.
 Lisa was a strong supporter of Libreboot in the very early days of the project,
 and her contributions were invaluable. I, Leah Rowe, owe her a debt of gratitude.
 Marcus Moeller
 --------------
 Made the libreboot logo.
 Leah worked on all aspects of a previous project we are continuing, such as the
 build system. This is the automated build system that currently sits at
 the heart of GNU Boot; it downloads, patches, configures and compiles the
 relevant components like coreboot, GNU GRUB and generates the ROM images that
 you can find in release archives.
 Patrick "P. J." McDermott
 ---------------------------
-Patrick also did a lot of research and wrote the libreboot FAQ section
+Patrick also did a lot of research and wrote the FAQ section
 relating to the [Intel Management Engine](../faq.md#intelme), in addition
-to making several improvements to the build system in libreboot. **Former
+to making several improvements to the build system.
 libreboot project maintainer.**
 In 2016, Leah Rowe ran a Libreboot installation workshop at the FSF's
 LibrePlanet conference. Working alongside Leah, Patrick helped run the workshop
 and assisted with installing Libreboot onto people's machines.
 Paul Kocialkowski
 -----------------
-Ported the ARM (Rockchip RK3288 SoC) based *Chromebook* laptops to
+Ported the ARM (Rockchip RK3288 SoC) based *Chromebook* laptops. 
-libreboot. Also one of the main [Replicant](http://www.replicant.us/)
+Also one of the main [Replicant](http://www.replicant.us/)
 developers.
 Paul Menzel
@ -274,21 +105,19 @@ when initializing the Intel video chipset, was mapping *GTT Stolen Memory* in
 the wrong place, because the code was based on kernel code and the Linux kernel
 had the same bug. When Linux fixed it, it exposed the same bug in coreboot.
-Paul worked with Libreboot on
+Paul worked on this, sending patches to test periodically until the bug was fixed
-this, sending patches to test periodically until the bug was fixed
+in coreboot.
 in coreboot, and then helped her integrate the fix in libreboot.
 Peter Stuge
 -----------
-Helped write the [FAQ section about DMA](../faq.md#hddssd-firmware), and provided
+Helped write the [FAQ section about DMA](../faq.md#hddssd-firmware). 
-general advice in the early days of the project. Peter was a coreboot developer
+Peter was a coreboot developer in those days, and a major developer in the
-in those days, and a major developer in the *libusb* project (which flashrom
+*libusb* project (which flashrom makes heavy use of).
 makes heavy use of).
 Peter also wrote the *bucts* utility used to set Backup Control (BUC) Top Swap
 (TS) bit on i945 laptops such as ThinkPad X60/T60, which is useful for a
-workaround to flash Libreboot without using external hardware; on this machine,
+workaround to flash without using external hardware; on this machine,
 with Lenovo BIOS present, it's possible to flash everything except the main
 bootblock, but Intel platforms have 2 bootblocks, and you specify which one is
 to be used by setting the TS bit. You then boot with only one bootblock flashed
@ -304,81 +133,18 @@ bitfields in C) this descriptor region. With some clever tricks, he was able to
 discover the existence of a bit in the descriptor for *disabling* the Intel ME
 (management engine) on those platforms.
 His initial proof of concept only defined the descriptor, and would do this:
 * Read the default descriptor and GbE regions from a Lenovo X200 ROM (default
  firmware, not coreboot)
 * Disable the ME, by setting 2 bits in the descriptor
 * Disable the ME region
 * Move descriptor+GbE (12KiB in total) next to each other
 * Allocate the remaining flash space to the BIOS region
 * Generated the 12KiB descriptor+GbE region, based on this, to insert into a
  coreboot ROM image.
 In the early days, before Libreboot supported GM45+ICH9M platforms such as
 ThinkPad X200/T400, you could use those machines but to avoid the Intel ME you
 had to flash it without a descriptor region. This worked fine in those days,
 because the ME only handled TPM and AMT on those machines, and the system would
 work normally, but that Intel Flash Descriptor also handles the Intel GbE NVM
 region in flash, which is used for the Intel Gigabit Ethernet interface.
 So you either had Intel ME, or no ethernet support. Steve figured out how to
 disable the Intel ME via 2 toggle bits in the descriptor, and also how to
 remove the Intel ME region from flash.
 Based on his research, I, Leah Rowe, working alongside Steve, also reverse
 engineered the layout of the Intel GbE NVM (non-volatile memory) region in the
 boot flash. This region defines configuration options for the onboard Intel
 GbE NIC, if present.
 Based on this, I was able to take Steve's initial proof of concept and write
 the `ich9gen` utility, which generates an Intel Flash Descriptor and GbE NVM
 region, from scratch, without an Intel ME region defined. It is this tool,
 the `ich9gen` tool, that Libreboot uses to provide ROM images for GM45+ICH9M
 platforms (such as ThinkPad X200/T400/T500/W500), with a fully functional
 descriptor and functional Gigabit Ethernet, but *without* needing Intel
 Management Engine (ME) firmware, thus making those machines *libre* (the ME
 is fully disabled, when you use a descriptor+gbe image generated by `ich9gen`).
 With *my* `ich9gen` tool (Steve's tool was called `ich9deblob`), you didn't
 need a dump of the original Lenovo BIOS firmware anymore! I could not have
 written this tool, without Steve's initial proof of concept. I worked with him,
 extensively, for many months. All GM45+ICH9M support (X200, T400, etc) in
 Libreboot is made possible because of the work he did, back in 2014.
 Swift Geek
 ----------
-Contributed a patch for ich9gen to generate 16MiB descriptors.
+Contributed a patch for ich9gen to generate 16MiB descriptors and upstream
 development on GNU GRUB, and technical advice.
 After that, Swift Geek slowly became more involved until he became a full time
 developer. Swift Geeks contributions were never really in the form of *code*,
 but what he lacked in code, he made up for in providing excellent support, both
 to users and other developers, helping others learn more about technology at a
 low level.
 When Swift Geek was a member of the project, his role was largely providing
 user support (in the IRC channel), and conducting research. Swift Geek knows a
 lot about hardware. Swift Geek also did some upstream development on GNU GRUB.
 Swift Geek has provided technical advice on numerous occasions, to Leah Rowe,
 and helped her to improve her soldering skills in addition to teaching her
 some repair skills, to the point where she can now repair most faults on
 ThinkPad mainboards (while looking at the schematics and boardview).
 Swiftgeek left the project in March 2021. I, Leah Rowe, wish him all the best
 in his endeavours, and I'm very grateful to his numerous contributions over the
 years.
 Timothy Pearson
 ---------------
 Ported the ASUS KGPE-D16 board to coreboot for the company Raptor
-Engineering of which Timothy is the CEO.
+Engineering of which Timothy is the CEO. Timothy maintains this code in coreboot.
 Timothy maintains this code in coreboot,
 helping the project with the libreboot integration for it. This person's
 contact details are on the raptor site, or you can ping **tpearson** on
 the Libera IRC network.
 vitali64
 --------
@ -389,11 +155,11 @@ CPU temperatures on idle usage. vitali64 on irc
 Vladimir Serbinenko
 -------------------
-Ported many of the thinkpads supported in libreboot, to coreboot, and
+Ported many of the thinkpads supported in GNU Boot, to coreboot, and
-made many fixes in coreboot which benefited the libreboot project.
+made many fixes in coreboot which benefited the project.
 Vladimir wrote a lot of the original video initialization code used by various
-Intel platforms in Libreboot, when flashing it (now rewritten
+Intel platforms, when flashing it (now rewritten
 by others in Ada, for libgfxinit in coreboot, but originally it was written in
 C and included directly in coreboot; libgfxinit is a 3rdparty submodule of
 coreboot).