Re: OpenFirmware and interrupt-map

[YhLu]

SCSI card option rom may do several thing:
1. download FW from other address in the Option rom or BIOS into SCSI
Controller, then start the controller.
2. Booting OS from SCSI disk.

Some SCSI addon card has another EEPROM for FW, and the controller will work
after power is on.

For onboard SCSI, may spare that EEPROM and need option rom to download fw
into it.

The other thing for Option ROM is providing booting from SCSI disk or CDROM.

If the System is boot from Network or other media, You may don't need this
booting feature.

Actually the FW download and controller starting can be done by Linux kernel
driver.

YH.

-----邮件原件-----
发件人: ron minnich [mailto:[e-mail]] 
发送时间: 2004年2月4日 15:39
收件人: Eric W. Biederman
抄送: Stefan Reinauer; Tarl Neustaedter; LinuxBIOS
主题: Re: OpenFirmware and interrupt-map

On 4 Feb 2004, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
> Interesting.  I do know that the RAID/SCSI x86 option roms in general
> were not needed on the Alpha.  Do you know of any RAID/SCSI cards that
> actually need their option ROM to be run?
>
> Every one I have research it is a non issue.

I forget which card it was, but we did have a problem here at one point 
with a card that really needed that scsi bios to be run. We junked the 
card.

ron

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OpenFirmware and interrupt-map

YhLu  writes:
> SCSI card option rom may do several thing:
> download FW from other address in the Option rom or BIOS into SCSI
>
> Controller, then start the controller.
> 2. Booting OS from SCSI disk.
>
> Some SCSI addon card has another EEPROM for FW, and the controller will work
> after power is on.
>
> For onboard SCSI, may spare that EEPROM and need option rom to download fw
> into it.
>
> The other thing for Option ROM is providing booting from SCSI disk or CDROM.
>
> If the System is boot from Network or other media, You may don't need this
> booting feature.
>
> Actually the FW download and controller starting can be done by Linux kernel
> driver.

Right.  And my experience has been that the linux driver usually
does all of that.

So I think I have come up with a decent short term strategy.  
1) Support all of the architectural hardware in small bootloaders
   like etherboot and FILO.   This can be used as the bootloader
   of the fallback image because it will be small.

2) Support all of the weird hardware with hardware with a Linux kernel.
   If something needs to be run before the Linux driver that can
   easily be done with a user space emulators.

So except for USB step one is done.  Step 2 getting the kernel up
to speed as a bootloader is going to be interesting.

Eric

OpenFirmware and interrupt-map

[Stefan Reinauer]

* YhLu  [040205 02:39]:
> Some SCSI addon card has another EEPROM for FW, and the controller will work
> after power is on.
>
> For onboard SCSI, may spare that EEPROM and need option rom to download fw
> into it.
> From what I heard about the LSI1030, nobody ever built a board with this

extra eeprom actually connected, so there is no real alternative other
than downloading the controller firmware
> Actually the FW download and controller starting can be done by Linux kernel
> driver.

Aha! This sounds really interesting. Looking into the code, there is
/dev/mptctl. This can be used for firmware upload/download (ioctl
interface) - Is there a utility to do this, yet?

Stefan