October 2003 - OpenBIOS - mail.coreboot.org

C bindings
by Samuel Rydh Oct. 31, 2003

Oct. 31, 2003

Wouldn't it make sense to add some C-bindings to the forth kernel? I have examined all the built-in tokens and as far as far as I can tell there is currently no way to call an external function (well, save abusing the inb/outb mechanism). Some background: The forth kernel and the MOL OF loader are statically linked as a single binary (the ROM image). The MOL part of the code contains low-level support for exceptions and similar things. It also contains filesystem support, SCSI support, boot disk search algorithms, device tree handling and the OF client interface (and some other stuff). To make the C-code and the forth code interoperate, I would like to be able to 1. Call C-functions from forth code by pushing the address of the function on the stack. Something like call ( function_addr -- <whatever> ) 2. Be able to invoke the forth interpreter from C-code (I think this can be implementable without modifying the kernel code, but I haven't looked into it yet). I can of course solve the first point be adding a primitive to the words[] table, but wouldn't it make sense also for other projects? I imagine that a real-world implementation will implement some things in C (more people are familiar with C and there are already plenty of code written in C that can be reused; filesystems for instance...). /Samuel

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Re: OpenFirmware and Mac-on-Linux
by Samuel Rydh Oct. 26, 2003

Oct. 26, 2003

On Sat, Oct 25, 2003 at 02:45:19PM +0200, Stefan Reinauer wrote: > >Yes, I think so. I'm not sure exactly how much work is involved but > >I will give it a go (it is not necessary to do a full OF implementation > >right away...). > > > I can have a look on integrating the MOL OF functionality into > BeginAgain, but for putting BeginAgain into MOL I'd prefer if you could > try this first. Certainly. I don't think putting the MOL OF code directly into BeginAgain is such a good idea, at least not the current incarnation of the of-mol code. My thought was to add the BeginAgain kernel to of-mol and then gradually start to use it for OF client services and for user interaction. > >For MOL, the device tree is loaded from a config file (for MacOS, it is > >essentially a copy of a "real" device tree). Bus probing and > >similar things are not needed (although one could implement this > >if one really wants to). Cloning the device tree at OF startup is > >sufficient > >(just like most parts of the device tree is hardcoded in ROM in most > >machines). > > > Ah.. these device tree files I have seen. It's a really quick way of > setting resources up for different kinds of systems. Are the different > device trees needed for different purposes/machines? Yes, different device trees are used for different purposes. The Mac OS 9 device-tree originates from a B&W G3. Since only certain PCI-bridges and interrupt controllers are suppoerted by the OS, I have to use those in the device-tree. MacOS 9 also expects certain legacy hardware to be present (the via-cuda for instance). In general, I prefer to use virtual MOL hardware rather then emulated real-world hardware since this is much more efficient (the MOL OS side driver just makes "system calls" to MOL rather than accessing hardware through PCI register). The Mac OS X device tree has essentially been built from scratch. It contains more virtual MOL hardware than the Mac OS 9 tree. Since OSX is a much more open architecture, it is possible to write custom MOL drivers for things like interrupt controllers so there is no need to emulate any hardware at all. > Or is it just a matter of emulating the > kind of machine that you have Mol running on? No, MOL is completely hardware independent (except that 601 based CPUs are unsupported). > Do you have scripts for cloning the device tree in OpenFirmware? No, not in OpenFirmware. Under linux, a copy of the device tree is available under /proc/device-tree so it is just a matter of reformatting things into a format more suitable for MOL. > The device tree should actually be hardcoded for all onboard devices > and only expansion cards like PCI should be dynamically added. Yes, this is essentially what MOL does. Only a few minor tweaks are done to the device tree at startup (MOL supports three parallell virtual network cards, but typically only a single one is used). > In BeginAgain I've implemented a plugin > system that allows to emulate PCI cards in a simple manner. I planned to > do the Framebuffer output this way, but since OpenBIOS lacks a PCI > driver and a framebuffer driver you get nothing but a black window that > you can write to with lowlevel functions.. > > If you don't disagree I'd like to move this discussion to > openbios(a)lists.openbios.org in future. Sure. /Samuel

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PC BIOS included in the project?
by Dedeco Oct. 25, 2003

Oct. 25, 2003

Hello, I am a newbie in this subjet, and thus I do not know if my question is really redundant, but is this project also about PC's BIOS (e.g. American Megatrends)? How can I make something to change my BIOS? (after I understand how PC works (deeply), and know how to code) Thank you. __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? The New Yahoo! Shopping - with improved product search http://shopping.yahoo.com

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Re: [OpenBIOS] First contact
by Stefan Reinauer Oct. 14, 2003

Oct. 14, 2003

Hi Frank, * Frank Alcantara <frank(a)thyamad.com> [031014 14:00]: > I am a complete newbie in BIOS Area, I am starting this just now. So I > guess the freebios is the best option to my embedded projects. Few day > ago, I saw some posts about a Award bios source, this source should be > very usefully for who is starting, there are this source available? > Where can I find this? There are others bios sources available? I will > starting in freebios studying all possible sources and posting all of my > observations, please help me in this startup. Award BIOS Source code was illegally published quite a long while ago, but it is not advisable to use this for any purpose, since it is Award/Phoenix's intellectual property. See http://www.openbios.org/project/rules.html Since most closed source software is never reviewed by a huge amount of community people, I am deeply convinced that you can learn a lot more about techniques, concepts and implementation from the free firmware variants that are out there, namely LinuxBIOS, OpenBIOS, uboot, gbios, Proll, Tiara. Find the URLs at http://www.openbios.org/docs/links.html Stefan

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EFI noise on slashdot
by Torsten Duwe Oct. 14, 2003

Oct. 14, 2003

Just to again cause some traffic on this list ;-) If you, like myself, don't read slahdot, here's what I just came across as a search result. It is from end february, but I haven't seen an echo on this list, besides a comment from eric ["boy is EFI a kludge!"] in august which I'm not sure of whether it's related. http://slashdot.org/articles/03/02/20/189208.shtml "BIOS' Days Are Numbered" Set your comment threshold to 5 and/or search for openfirmware !-] It may be a good start to follow up on once we have something usable. Torsten

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First contact
by Frank Alcantara Oct. 14, 2003

Oct. 14, 2003

Hi I am a complete newbie in BIOS Area, I am starting this just now. So I guess the freebios is the best option to my embedded projects. Few day ago, I saw some posts about a Award bios source, this source should be very usefully for who is starting, there are this source available? Where can I find this? There are others bios sources available? I will starting in freebios studying all possible sources and posting all of my observations, please help me in this startup. Please forgive my awful English and thanks in advance. Frank Alcantara. Thyamad Consultoria. frank(a)thyamad.com http://www.thyamad.com

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[announce] OpenBIOS Forth Kernel V1.1
by Stefan Reinauer Oct. 13, 2003

Oct. 13, 2003

Dear OpenBIOS community, it's time for another update of BeginAgain, the OpenBIOS forth kernel, and it does deserve version number 1.1 It is available from the OpenBIOS CVS in the directory "kernel/" or at http://www.openbios.org/bin/kernel-1.1.tar.bz2 Changes since 1.0 ----------------- - some code optimizations speed BeginAgain up by an average of 20%, loops are up to 300% faster. - fixes, cleanups.. IO operations work now, compiling on BSD almost works ;-) - new plugin interface allows external plugins to emulate certain hardware. - A PCI plugin allows emulating PCI devices in the Linux/Unix version of BeginAgain - A QT plugin emulates a graphics card providing an 8bit framebuffer. There's currently no fcode driver yet to drive this framebuffer, but it can be accessed from forth. Installation and usage ---------------------- The beginning of documentation is available at http://www.openbios.org/development/kernel.html Bug reports ----------- Any trouble, bugs etc. should be reported to the openbios mailinglist <openbios(a)lists.openbios.org> Best regards, Stefan

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Road-plan and other stuff?
by André-John Mas Oct. 7, 2003

Oct. 7, 2003

Hi, I am new to the project and had a few questions. I have browsed around the OpenBIOS web site, to get an idea of what is going on and where its at. Looking at the 'progress' page I see that the work currently seems to be focused on the Forth core engine and the Forth base dictionary. As to the other projects there is no information, other than being at 0%. Has any one already suggested a direction for these projects and what they expect from them? For example, the user interface in all open firmware solutions I have seen so far (Sun boxes and Apple Macs, with new world ROM) all have a command line interface. Would it be conceivable to add a PC BIOS style GUI, in addition to the CLI for 'high-level' configuration. In addition, while doing a search on the web I came up with the following documents that might be useful - I hope none of them cause issue: From the Apple site: http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn/tn1061.html http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn/tn1044.html http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn/tn1062.html http://developer.apple.com/hardware/pci/index.html - bottom: "Forth for Open Firmware Basics" tutorial presentations. Other stuff may be of interest. Elsewhere: http://homepage.mac.com/potswa/source/ http://people.cornell.edu/pages/ak234/BootSafe/main.htm http://www.hempeldesigngroup.com/lego/pbForth/ http://www.openppc.org/software.html - some references to open firmware http://www.software-x.com/software-x/bios.html regards André-John

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