Status report.... - coreboot

18 Apr 2003


      I am slowly putting together a working LinuxBIOS development tree.
I have romcc up and working and initializing memory on my target
hammer board.  The memory configuration completely hard coded
but it works.
I am using gcc's C preprocessor because I need the ability
to stringize a macro to print out the LinuxBIOS version string,
and I don't feel like implementing macros with arguments and
all of the little quirks right now.
One of my first steps is making hardwaremain generic and in just
starting that and looking at it's dependencies I have found a huge
mess of code that needs to be cleaned up.
Just a small taste.  Why are the I/O primitives in cpu/p5/io.h
and not directly in arch/io.h?  And why to we have piles of code
in that header that are ifdefed out.  Most of the code left over
from the earliest days of LinuxBIOS is similarly nasty.
There is a list that goes on and on, and tomorrow I will get serious
about cleaning it out.
With a little luck I am maybe a week out from having my hammer code
being self hosting.  That is a week out from gluing the LinuxBIOS tree
back together enough that I can load etherboot and have normal and
fallback images.  At which point I should have enough bandwidth
to get the last of the little things I care about resolved in
on the stable branch.  I would worry about that more but my primary
responsibility at this point is to get the Hammer port up and going.
Eric