Uwe, See my answers below.
Uwe Hermann wrote:
Hi Marc!
On Tue, May 01, 2007 at 04:48:27PM -0600, Marc Jones wrote:
Hello LinuxBIOS Community,
My name is Marc Jones and I work for the AMD embedded group. Jordan Crouse and I have been working with Ron Minnich on a Geode LX LinuxBIOS implementation for the AMD Norwich development platform.
This is great news! Thanks a lot for your work!
You are welcome.
Our implementation has been split into four patches: cpu, northbridge, southbridge, and mainboard. All four are required to build the Norwich platform. Ron and I expect this to break the current OLPC mainboards. We will work on fixing then soon (Note that OLPC went from GX to LX so an update was required regardless).
The LX-based OLPC should become another subdirectory of olpc/, just like rev_a and btest, right? I'd rather not touch the existing directories if the changes are that massive. This way we wouldn't break any targets (just add a new one), correct?
This will break the olpc targets but they were already suffering from bitrot in the division of northbridge and chipset code. Ron and I agreed to move ahead and to bring them up to speed when we can. The priority will be the LX version since the rev a/b are already out of date and will not see production.
In addition to the patches you will need the Geode LX VSA binary that is located here:
http://www.amd.com/files/connectivitysolutions/geode/geode_lx/lx_vsa.36k.bin...
Where's the source code? SCNR :)
I assume the source is not publically available? That would sure be great! If not, what exact usage rights come with the binary?
The VSA binary source is LGPL and is available at: http://dev.laptop.org/git.do?p=geode-vsa This is just a temporary home until we can port it to open source/linux tools and find the code a home. It currently builds with Microsoft MASM and C. We are trying to move to GCC. We post the binary since most OSD can't build it.
Also, is the VSA binary needed for _any_ LinuxBIOS usage on the LX, or just to enable certain features? In other words, can we do _anything_ with the LX without the VSA binary?
VSA is not required. An example is the OLPC Open Firmware + custom Linux image.
Uwe.
Marc