Hello,
I was asked to post it here too.
I would like to announce that I was able to boot Linux using u-boot on AMD64 motherboard Asrock 939A785G. The development was done on QEMU.
How does it work?
Coreboot does the complete HW init including memory setup PCI etc. When finishes it loads u-boot.
Coreboot is free software replacement for BIOS, but unlike BIOS it only does the hardware init (and ACPI). A payload needs to be executed which does something useful for the user (like a linux kernel, SeaBIOS, FILO, grub etc)
You can read more about coreboot on http://coreboot.org
How the porting was done is described here:
http://blogs.coreboot.org/blog/2011/04/30/u-boot-as-coreboot-payload/
http://www.coreboot.org/pipermail/coreboot/2011-April/064877.html http://www.coreboot.org/pipermail/coreboot/2011-May/064914.html http://www.coreboot.org/pipermail/coreboot/2011-May/064915.html
And boot log http://assembler.cz/minicom42.txt
This project started "just for fun" or "because I can". Maybe there are some real uses. If you can think of some, please let me know.
Anyone with more free time could work on this?
I'm not subscribed, please cc me. I'm ccing coreboot mailing list too.
Thanks, Rudolf