Thank you very much! I got very clear concepts on coreboot, old bios and linux from you, it's very helpful. I think coreboot is doing the right thing, providing more and better support for AMD shall be a pressure on intel and other cpu and chipset vendors, I think. I'm reading the source code of flashrom now, hope i can figure out it. :)
On Tue, Jul 1, 2008 at 8:46 AM, Peter Stuge peter@stuge.se wrote:
Hello,
On Tue, Jul 01, 2008 at 08:00:15AM +0800, Star Liu wrote:
Is the rumor me?
No. But because there have been many inquiries about support for recent Intel hardware in a short time, maybe your message was interpreted as indication of a starting trend.
If it's me, I'd like the tell what the inside is. I'm a newbie in free software development, and I'd like to start my free software development from the coreboot project.
Great! You are very welcome. I hope you will like it as much as we do. :) It is a lot of fun!
In China, so many people(more than a half) use intel cpus, and most of them are above P4, including me.
I don't know the statistics for Sweden where I am, but Intel systems are popular here too.
So when i found coreboot only support intel cpu up to PIII, I'm very curious, and willing to make it support intel cpus above P4. That's why I asked so many questions about intel cpu.
I believe curiosity and desire to improve is the true spirit of open source! But as Jordan wrote, it is far from trivial to add support for new CPUs and chipsets, even when the documentation is available.
You asked how come Linux works on Intel CPUs without documentation and the answer is that Linux doesn't need it. At least not the same documentation. Linux relies heavily on the boot firmware (BIOS or coreboot or something else) to do many tasks in order to make the system run in a stable way, and because the firmware must take care of this setup, Linux does not need the documentation.
The major tasks are:
- Start and tune the RAM controller
- Start and tune all buses in the system
These two high-level tasks may seem simple, but they quickly branch into many things that must be taken into consideration in the code.
I don't think lack of support to something of coreboot will discourage people involve in, for me, I just want to make practice,
Please do not feel discouraged. We only want to share our experience from previous work, because it is difficult to estimate the effort that is required for extending coreboot. In general, it has not been easy to get information from Intel for their recent CPUs and chipsets. As others have confirmed, it is certainly not impossible to get good info from Intel if the circumstances are right, but I think the project and it's individual contributors are still far away from that situation.
AMD on the other hand are being very helpful, and as a result there is much better support for their products in coreboot. Also, more time is spent working on improvements related to AMD CPUs and chipsets.
Best regards
//Peter
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