On 02/10/07 10:20 -0600, Lane Brooks wrote:
Attached is a patch that enables AMD Geode CS5536 chipset support. I have tested it successfully on a MSM800 board from digital logic. It does, however, have a few issues that I would like some feedback on.
In my discussions with Marc Jones, Geode systems write protect the BIOS via RCONFs (cache settings similar to MTRRs). Unlocking requires changing MSR 0x1808 top byte to 0x22. Reading and writing to the msr, however, requires instrucitons rdmsr/wrmsr, which are ring0 privileged instructions so only the kernel can do the read/write. So my patch uses the msr kernel module to access these instructions from user space using the /dev/cpu/0/msr device.
My questions are:
- I do not think this is portable beyond linux. Is that an issue?
Right now, no. Any other *nixish OS will have to solve the MSR problem for themselves. If they chose something different, then we'll cross that bridge when we get to it.
- My code assumes the msr kernel module is already loaded. Is there a
way to force a kernel module to load from the C code? My code does die gracefully with a message reminding them to load the kernel module if things fail.
Thats the best we can do, without getting more non-portable. I think.
Jordan