I will mention an idea I mentioned some time ago.
Now that we have cache-as-ram, it is possible to build a linuxbios which contains the emulator. But what you would do is very different: 1. start up 2. enable CAR 3. start the emulator with the proprietary BIOS as the payload. 4. Run it with max debug, and observe the register activity, etc. 5. you will be able to see enough to probably figure out how DRAM is started up.
This is doable TODAY.
Note also that you can run the proprietary bios under the emulator in the linuxbios tree and observe behaviour to see things, which might help. I.e. from under linux, you can run the BIOS and observe a little bit of what it does, up to the point at which it starts messing with I/Os and gets confused.
Our emulator is a very powerful tool, just waiting for someone to use it in CAR mode to figure out what the BIOS is doing. The question is, is the CAR memory size big enough for the emulator? I think it might be.
I think we have more than enough smart people on this list now to make this work. If you made it work, it would open up a lot of chipsets.
thanks
ron