Hello everyone! My name is Jacob Garber, and I am a student in this year’s GSoC 2019! My project is on making coreboot Coverity clean. Coverity is a free static-analysis tool for open source projects that searches for common coding mistakes and errors, such as buffer overruns, null pointer dereferences, and integer overflow. Coverity automatically analyzes the coreboot codebase and flags issues it finds, and my job is to classify them into bugs and false-positives and patch them if I can. You can check the Coverity overview for coreboot here, though seeing the issue tracker itself requires registration. At the beginning of the summer, coreboot had over 380 flagged issues, but it’s now down to 303, so we’re making progress! I plan to address 20–30 issues per week depending on the source component, which so far has gone surprisingly well. (Surprising, in the sense that coming into the summer I knew very little about coreboot or firmware development in general.) For the curious, you can see the history and progress of all my changes on Gerrit. My mentors for this project are Patrick Georgi, Martin Roth, and David Hendricks, who have all been extremely helpful in guiding me through the development process, reviewing my patches, and answering my many questions. Thank you all.

Now, fixing Coverity bugs isn’t the only thing I’d like to do this summer. As I said before, I’d like to learn more about coreboot, and what better way to do that than installing it on a laptop! My current laptop is an old 2011 Macbook Air, which is surprisingly close to getting coreboot support (many thanks to Evgeny Zinoviev). However, I am (slightly) hesitant about installing yet-experimental firmware on my one and only development machine, so until then I picked up an old Thinkpad T500 to practice on. This laptop has the advantage of being able to run blob-free, and if in the very unlikely event I end up bricking it, who cares! (I mean, I’ll care, but it’ll be a worthy sacrifice.) I also bought a BeagleBone Black to try out external flashing and was hoping to include a picture today, but the shipping was delayed. You’ll have to wait until next week!