Uwe Hermann wrote:
Here's a patch which adds IDE support to the Intel 82371EB southbridge.
With this patch I can boot a Linux kernel with FILO up until the login prompt. I can login and use the system, too. Feels a bit slowish, but maybe that's just because the CPU and disk are dead slow...
And perhaps also because you're using a serial console (on said dead slow system)? Still, great work!
(Hm, there's an "Enable Ultra DMA/33" setting on the IDE controller -- should I enable that in the southbridge code, or can Linux do that and it's superfluous in the BIOS?)
Couldn't hurt to enable it (except for a couple extra microseconds spent in the BIOS). Although probably best to have it as a config option. Not that I expect anyone to have any non-dma disks, but some compact flash adapters don't like dma mode, although they tell the BIOS/linux that they support it. On my little file server, debian takes about 3 minutes to boot because it tries every DMA mode before it gives up and disables it. But I can't disable dma outright, because the two hard drives do support it, and I don't want them to be deathly slow.
Anyway, this patch also fixes random other southbridge files, and I'm adding my copyright header to some other files as they're either trivial and/or my changes are pretty much a rewrite...
There's some more stuff missing from the 82371EB (e.g. USB support), but that's for another patch...
Hmm...from the code I've seen for other southbridges, namely vt8235 and i82801ca/db/dbm, most seem to have code for enabling the USB, and then have it commented out, presumably because the developer(s) discovered that it worked fine with whatever normal pci device init linuxbios does. Does linux automagically load the usb modules?
-Corey