ron minnich rminnich@lanl.gov writes:
On 30 Sep 2003, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
There are boards that a pirq routing table simply does not work for, because not all interrupts go through the pirq router. For those boards we either we need to just go through the mptable, or we need to pre route the irqs and fill in the routing in pci space. Pre routing the irqs is the most compatible with multiple kernels and OS's.
still worse, there are those cases (Linux) where the interpretation of PIRQ is broken (e.g. for Geode). So I've reluctantly come to the conclusion that LinuxBIOS should do this routing.
Once we get that we can figure out how to export that information via the LinuxBIOS table, the mptable, and pirq table. I am tempted at that point to move the mptable and pirq table generation code into mkelfImage, and to start looking at having the kernel support the LinuxBIOS table directly.
we need to leave them in LinuxBIOS, I think, so that I can continue to support 9load, plan 9, and all the other systems that want to read PIRQ. I would hate to see mkelfImage get too complicated, as I need to be able to generate these elf Images on systems that have no GNUbin utilities.
mkelfImage 2.x does not have a binutils requirement, except when it is built. mkelfImage 2.x is a standalone C binary.
Removing the non native interface from the core is something I'm playing with. It is not something I care about much either was as long as we have a good native interface. But it should not much matter if we actually pre route the irqs. As suggested for the Geode.
In addition if we have maintain a subset of the kernel that understands native LinuxBIOS tables then we define the proper interpretation of the tables and we can say who has the correct interpretation.
But I totally agree this is something we need to move forward slowly with.
Eric