Stefan Reinauer stepan@coresystems.de writes:
I'm curious, is there any way to test the code through software, without a flash?
Not for this part of the code. Software emulations dont emulate the chipset well enough to find out whether your code does the right thing. Unless you are using SimNow to simulate an AMD system. Dont know if something like this exists for Intel CPUs though.
I would say that this is a shame. We really need a top-notch full system simulator. But doing complete and correct simulation of chipsets is hard, error prone and quite boring. Therefor emulators like QEMU take the short path, and put in a "phony" BIOS and more or less do not implement a northbridge at all.
What we need is a full-system simulator with the following characteristics;
* correct, * deterministic, * visible device state, * visible cpu state, * scriptable, * and pluggable (for profiling and coverage tools)
Note that I have not put "fast" on the list. I think that is secondary for our use case.
~j