On Fri, Apr 6, 2012 at 11:12 AM, Marc Jones marcj303@gmail.com wrote:
- Microcode updates
The "tiny" bootblock doesn't seem like the correct place for microcode updates.
Does microcode have to be this early? Before CAR?
Yes. Some history. We started out doing microcode updates in linux. Then it moved to the end of the ram stage. Then the start. Then it turned out it had to happen before CAR.
So be careful! Sure, it may not make sense, but hardware often does not. This is an example of a seemingly sensible change, that would work on many platforms, and destroy others. This is a really tricky area.
One such a nice app would be zmodem download of raminit.
This is an interesting thought, but really a debug/development feature.
We even talked about this in v3. But it never got done, seems there is no interest.
I am not convinced of the value of earlier serial console. It adds complexity where things should be simple. I hesitate to continue moving more code before CAR. We have had a long standing goal to reduce code before CAR.
CAR is fragile! I agree. It should be reduced as much as possible.
You may want to look at what we did in v3, it has some similarities to your ideas. And, we dropped it :-)
ron
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ron minnich