On Sat, 20 Feb 2010 17:39:03 -0500, Joseph Smith joe@settoplinux.org wrote:
On 02/20/2010 05:32 PM, Stefan Reinauer wrote:
Hi there,
the intel southbridge drivers are a mess.
I suggest to do the following:
cd coreboot/src/southbridge svn mv i82801ca i82801cx svn mv i82801dbm i82801dx svn mv i82801er i82801ex svn copy i82801xx i82801bx svn mv i82801xx i82801ax
(plus, fixing up the filenames in these directories and the romstage.c and Kconfig files of the mainboards using those drivers)
And then cleaning up all the code undermining the driver infrastructure in the 82801xx driver, so we can drop the spaghetti code that checks for PCI devices in actual init functions all over the place.
Why? Because it is simply unmaintainable. The unified driver is not unified, it's rather incomplete enough so nobody noticed. The ICH4 and ICH4M are very similar. So are the ICH5 and ICH5M and ICH5R. It's a good idea to have a "unified" driver per chipset generation. But not across several generations of chipsets.
In order to fix graphics output for the i830/ich4 combination I'd like to add an SMM handler and MBI interface to the ICH4 specific version of the code. But there's not much gain in trying to check ICH0 datasheets to see if what was never intended to be done on that chipset is possible. And if I go and add guards for PCI IDs in the code, I'll rather clean up the code to get it do the PCI ID matching that coreboot intended for such cases instead of spaghettiing them into runtime
checks.
I don't think that a shared driver like this is worth the ugliness that comes with it. It's fair to say that if you don't know if you have an ICH0 or ICH4, you can't do a coreboot port, because you will fail in so many other places before and after that.
So folks, if you agree that we should clean up coreboot and make it easier for people, send me an Acked-by: for the above idea.
Signed-off-by: Stefan Reinauer stepan@coresystems.de
You have my Acked-by: Joseph Smith joe@settoplinux.org
But you may want to hear from others first.
Anyone else want to comment on this?