* Patrick Georgi patrick@georgi-clan.de [130320 11:52]:
Am 20.03.2013 11:28, schrieb Paul Menzel:
- Is that even possible for AMD/ATI hardware in their current design
with ATOM BIOS and firmware?
For simply initializing the chip, tracing what the driver does works just as well as on Intel chips.
The main issue is that OS drivers have an expectation to find those tables (closed source drivers less so than open source, it seems), so you'd need to provide them in one form or another.
Semi-automatically building new (and independent) ATOMBIOS tables from trace data is probably a hard problem.
As far as I remember, ATOM BIOS is some sort of virtual machine that interprets a list of memory and IO instructions to initialize the hardware. Which is actually very similar to what Ron does now on the Sandybridge/Ivybridge hardware.
Maybe it's feasible to find and interpret the ATOM BIOS tables in the vga oprom of those machines as a first step instead of jumping into the blob?
A next step might be to port those tables to work with Ron's state machine? And/or SeaBIOS' VGA oprom sub project.
Related information: http://olivermcfadden.livejournal.com/11669.html http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NjA2NA
Regards, Stefan