On 11.07.2008 20:51, Kevin O'Connor wrote:
On Fri, Jul 11, 2008 at 07:58:35PM +0200, Carl-Daniel Hailfinger wrote:
Can seabios somehow complement x86emu as a way to let certain problematic VBIOS images run?
If you mean run seabios under x86emu - I'm not sure. Seabios currently does its initialization in 32bit mode which x86emu may not like.
Well, IIRC x86emu does not only emulate x86 instructions, but also calls to 16bit BIOS. I'd like to rip the BIOS emulation code out of x86emu and use SeaBIOS for that.
If you mean using seabios to implement the option rom scan - then yes, I think this is what Stefan suggested and Zhang Rui is working on. If I understand correctly, they want to load the seabios blob into ram, have seabios do its init, run the option roms, and then jump back to coreboot for the rest of the boot. Presumably, coreboot would also use seabios to boot the machine if the user wanted that.
That would be another alternative.
The thing to be careful of here is making sure coreboot and seabios don't stomp on each other. This may not be such a big deal - seabios doesn't currently write to any ram above 1MiB - if coreboot didn't write to any ram below 1MiB after launching seabios then maybe it would work.
Actually, I'm not afraid that SeaBIOS will stomp on coreboot, but I'm very afraid the option ROMs will do so.
Regards, Carl-Daniel