Jordan Crouse wrote:
Seriously, though - I think that optionROM handling should remain in coreboot, because I think thats the best place for it. Yes, an optionROM might start VGA, but that shouldn't mean we implicitly condone all graphics init in coreboot, just like we don't plan to spin up drives just because a RAID card optionROM is initialized.
Handling all devices of a certain type in the same place in a similar manner does lead to a sane code flow.
I am not sure we really want to handle graphics init sequences in 3 different places, depending on whether we have open source drivers or not.
The libpayload stuff for geode is nice, but there is similar code for ATI cards in linuxbios, and there is option rom based init in another place. This is very scattered and I don't really see the reason for that, nor believe it makes sense.
On a slightly different topic, we want to be careful not to move much functionality from coreboot to libpayload, because libpayload won't be used in many situations - it won't be used in conjunction with grub2 for example, nor for LAB, nor for gPXE - so we don't want to limit behavior that other payloads may find useful. Libpayload is _not_ a payload to rule them all.
I agree. Though I believe grub2 will use libpayload, eventually. It is interesting to see how quick libpayload might run towards a critical mass.
Stefan