coreboot AGESA support

[Tom Sylla]

This is mostly for the AMD guys, but is probably relevant to many on the list.

Is anyone working on getting AGESA working in coreboot again? Back
when we were deciding on a firmware solution for our platform, the
plan for LinuxBIOS AGESA support was a very good advantage for
coreboot. After seeing the path for AGESA support languish for a few
months, as well as Opteron support in general, we decided to use AMI
instead (for various other reasons too). With AMI, every month or so,
we get new AGESA drop, plop it in our build, and get various errata
fixes, HT support, Barcelona fixes, etc.

Is there any plan for this?

[Jordan Crouse]

On 12/04/08 10:10 -0400, Tom Sylla wrote:
> This is mostly for the AMD guys, but is probably relevant to many on the list.
>
> Is anyone working on getting AGESA working in coreboot again? Back
> when we were deciding on a firmware solution for our platform, the
> plan for LinuxBIOS AGESA support was a very good advantage for
> coreboot. After seeing the path for AGESA support languish for a few
> months, as well as Opteron support in general, we decided to use AMI
> instead (for various other reasons too). With AMI, every month or so,
> we get new AGESA drop, plop it in our build, and get various errata
> fixes, HT support, Barcelona fixes, etc.
>
> Is there any plan for this?

You need to read Marc's slides from the summit.  Long story short, yes.

(Ron, please get those up!)

Jordan

[Ward Vandewege]

On Sat, Apr 12, 2008 at 03:31:53PM -0600, Jordan Crouse wrote:
> On 12/04/08 10:10 -0400, Tom Sylla wrote:
> > This is mostly for the AMD guys, but is probably relevant to many on the list.
> >
> > Is anyone working on getting AGESA working in coreboot again? Back
> > when we were deciding on a firmware solution for our platform, the
> > plan for LinuxBIOS AGESA support was a very good advantage for
> > coreboot. After seeing the path for AGESA support languish for a few
> > months, as well as Opteron support in general, we decided to use AMI
> > instead (for various other reasons too). With AMI, every month or so,
> > we get new AGESA drop, plop it in our build, and get various errata
> > fixes, HT support, Barcelona fixes, etc.
> >
> > Is there any plan for this?
>
> You need to read Marc's slides from the summit.  Long story short, yes.
>
> (Ron, please get those up!)

They're up, linked from this page (look for Marc's talk):

http://www.coreboot.org/Coreboot_Symposium_2008

Thanks,
Ward.

[ron minnich]

Thanks Ward, will try to get the other presos up this weekend.

BTW, my reaction to Marc's talk was: AGESA looks like the ideal stage1
for v3. It even does ACPI. See what you think.

But we've come a long way when a major vendor like AMD makes the kind
of commitment seen in these slides. Thanks to AMD and Marc for an
excellent talk.

ron

[Carl-Daniel Hailfinger]

Hi,

first of all I want to thank AMD for their stellar ongoing commitment to
coreboot.

On 12.04.2008 23:40, ron minnich wrote:
> Thanks Ward, will try to get the other presos up this weekend.
>
> BTW, my reaction to Marc's talk was: AGESA looks like the ideal stage1
> for v3. It even does ACPI. See what you think.

I'd like to selectively merge parts of AGESA into v3 in a way that keeps
the current v3 architecture and enriches it with the much-wanted
ACPI/SMBIOS/etc abilities of AGESA.
This could even get us to the point where v3 has more features than v2
and becomes the preferred target for end-users.

Regards,
Carl-Daniel

[Marc Jones]

Tom Sylla wrote:
> This is mostly for the AMD guys, but is probably relevant to many on the list.
>
> Is anyone working on getting AGESA working in coreboot again? Back
> when we were deciding on a firmware solutin for our platform, the
> plan for LinuxBIOS AGESA support was a very good advantage for
> coreboot. After seeing the path for AGESA support languish for a few
> months, as well as Opteron support in general, we decided to use AMI
> instead (for various other reasons too). With AMI, every month or so,
> we get new AGESA drop, plop it in our build, and get various errata
> fixes, HT support, Barcelona fixes, etc.
>
> Is there any plan for this?

Tom,
This was all officially announced at the coreboot summit. You can see 
the slides here:
http://www.coreboot.org/Coreboot_Symposium_2008

All the new Barcelona(fam10) code has been ported from AGESA v3 (which 
supports fam10 and K8 revf/g). Although it might seem like support has 
languished, I have been working very hard on it and I have many changes 
to upstream in the next few weeks.

The reason AGESA is not a drop-in is that AGESA v3 is Intel style 
assembly built by Microsoft tools. Even with all the work to port to C 
and GCC it is still a very big advantage to port from AGESA. Getting the 
errata and fixes is a matter of a code diff and port. This is the reason 
for keeping the ported code as close as possible to AGESA which has made 
for some unsightly coreboot code. The other challenge has been to make 
the port fit into the coreboot v2 architecture and to stay similar to 
the current K8 code. Sometimes that worked and other times it didn't.

In the future this will be different. New versions of AGESA (for new 
CPUs) are being written in C but they probably won't have support for 
fam10. Using the AGESA APIs we should be able to write wrappers that 
will allow us to just drop in new releases of AGESA.

We are committed to release GPL AGESA but we are not there yet. Since we 
had to port from ASM to C anyway, that is where I started. It was also 
the fastest path to helping our customers. After I get a few more bugs 
worked out and get B3 support done I can start on the release process 
for GPL AGESA.

Marc

[Corey Osgood]

On Mon, Apr 14, 2008 at 2:16 PM, Marc Jones  wrote:
> Tom Sylla wrote:
> > This is mostly for the AMD guys, but is probably relevant to many on the
>
> list.
> > Is anyone working on getting AGESA working in coreboot again? Back
> > when we were deciding on a firmware solutin for our platform, the
> > plan for LinuxBIOS AGESA support was a very good advantage for
> > coreboot. After seeing the path for AGESA support languish for a few
> > months, as well as Opteron support in general, we decided to use AMI
> > instead (for various other reasons too). With AMI, every month or so,
> > we get new AGESA drop, plop it in our build, and get various errata
> > fixes, HT support, Barcelona fixes, etc.
> >
> > Is there any plan for this?
>
> Tom,
> This was all officially announced at the coreboot summit. You can see
> the slides here:
> http://www.coreboot.org/Coreboot_Symposium_2008

[OT] Did any video/audio recordings of the summit ever get made? I was
bummed that I couldn't go, so I was really hoping to at least get to see
some of the talks.

Thanks,
Corey

[ron minnich]

I am trying to find an 8mm deck to get them onto my mac.

ron