Richard Smith wrote:
Good plan. The inclusion of yet another hunk of 16-bit binary code in to the mix doesn't seem like a good long-term plan. We have enough trouble with the VGA binaries.
we did confirm during our discussions last week that there is nothing in principle that disallows SMI in 32-bit mode. So we could do the same trick we do for vgabios, where we pop into 32 bit from 16 bit mode (yes, I wrote that correctly!) and back to 16-bit mode for returning from SMI.
The better option is to write adapters for linuxbios and linux that use the GX2 MSRs directly and don't try to use 0xcfc/0xcf8 for PCI enumeration etc. But we'd have to convince linux, plan 9, bsd, etc. to pick this up ... that's definitely a longer-term issue. But I do think that, in the long run, we don't absolutely have to have vsa and SMI Int at all.
ron