On Sat, Oct 2, 2010 at 12:04 PM, Stefan Reinauer stefan.reinauer@coresystems.de wrote:
On 10/2/10 9:49 AM, ali hagigat wrote:
ordered 4 motherboards, over 11000$.
You made a very bad deal on those mainboards if that's USD. If I remember correctly the list price should rather be 1/10th of that for 4 mainboards.
I have ordered them by Kontron, it is a company in Germany. They do not sell motherboards, they sell a complete case of a computer and the price was nearly 2600$(KISS 2U, KISS 4U).
gives this information to big BIOS companies ONLY.
Not so true, other people made it, too. I even explained to you how to do it.
Stefan, you are working for a big company and you wrote for me that we could get that privileged license for documentation hardly after one year!!
At least you could update Wiki pages to state this fact clearly to stop people waste money.
I doubt we can keep the world from making bad decisions and seeking the fault in others by just putting a few words in a wiki.
Many may make this mistake because nobody can study Intel documents in details to know that there is unexplained parts in the manual before even getting a board. Now I have made it clear, before i do not think even one person mentioned the issue.
Have you even tried to understand the public documentation? We have over 50 contributors, so it seems others have made it, because they tried. Why don't you?
My plan was to gather a thorough knowledge of one example of Coreboot. I dislike much to deal with a subject which in incomplete.
from Corey Osgood corey.osgood@gmail.com to ali hagigat hagigatali@gmail.com cc coreboot@coreboot.org date Sat, Oct 2, 2010 at 12:30 PM subject Re: [coreboot] BBC EFI story
Most people don't insist on understanding every single line of chipset code to port a motherboard. If your chipset is supported, it should be relatively easy to port a board to it.
I do not want to port Coreboot first. My immediate purpose was to study and become proficient in the subject. How I can port Coreboot without even knowing it and researching on it first.
I understand that this can be frustrating, but it's something that the >coreboot project has no control over. NDA stands for Non-Disclosure Agreement, which means that
At least you could add some lines about NDA story and incomplete data sheets in Wiki or you could made the following fact clear :
"Anybody who wants to study and learn Coreboot must know that the documentation of hardware is incomplete and there are some hidden cases which will never become clear!!"
Don't blame coreboot for your own misunderstanding. Just because a project is open source doesn't mean every bit of data on how the code was written has public documentation. The linux kernel (and I imagine BSD, solaris, etc) is also open source, but some of the hardware supported within doesn't have public datasheets, or the datasheets that are public are incomplete.
Linux Kernel contains variety of software structures, techniques and logic except the architecture, Coreboot is about BIOS and it deals with hardware directly and mostly, having a complete hardware documentation is necessary and compulsory for Coreboot while Linux Kernel have many logical sections apart from architecture and they are used and learned independently. They are in two different categories in my opinion.
On Sat, Oct 2, 2010 at 3:19 AM, ali hagigat hagigatali@gmail.com wrote:
Stefan, you are working for a big company and you wrote for me that we could get that privileged license for documentation hardly after one year!!
Stefan's company is hardly a big company.
Many may make this mistake because nobody can study Intel documents in details to know that there is unexplained parts in the manual before even getting a board. Now I have made it clear, before i do not think even one person mentioned the issue.
I can only say that we have this discussion with people all the time on this list: "Will my board work". You made a mistake because you did not ask anyone before you spent money. You should have done some research.
Other people have managed to figure these things out; you could have too. I don't think you should blame us for your mistake.
ron
ali hagigat wrote:
At least you could update Wiki pages to state this fact clearly to stop people waste money.
I doubt we can keep the world from making bad decisions and seeking the fault in others by just putting a few words in a wiki.
Many may make this mistake because nobody can study Intel documents in details to know that there is unexplained parts in the manual before even getting a board. Now I have made it clear, before i do not think even one person mentioned the issue.
I have personally talked about this on many occasions, in several presentations which were recorded and are now linked to from the wiki, on the mailing list and in the IRC channel in previous discussions, and finally whenever I discuss documentation aspects with anyone in person at what is by now numerous occasions where I've shown coreboot at open source exhibitions.
I believe "the issue" that you refer to is that working with code on the firmware level requires specific information about the hardware.
As was pointed out, this is not a fact which coreboot decides over, it's up to the vendors of CPUs and chipsets, ie. electronic components.
Anyone with a background in the electronics industry will know that 20-30 years ago (or even more recent) vendors were very proud to publish documentation about their products, as a way to demonstrate their capabilities and benefits over their competition.
Some companies still do. Looking at the market for individual simpler ICs you will find that most vendors publish great datasheets for their components. I spent some time evaluating different AD and DA converters from one such company yesterday.
The world of PC components was similar, but the trend is that more and more of the inner workings of PCs are becoming too complex for many to dare to publish information, without the NDAs.
I understand that this fact is completely unknown to someone who is new to the electronics field in general or the PC electronics field in particular.
However, coreboot does have a lot of documentation (maybe too much) and the participants are extraordinarily helpful to those who are interested and willing to learn about this wonderful world.
The wiki does have a page with links to datasheets. The page is called Datasheets. It's here: http://www.coreboot.org/Datasheets
In your reading of the wiki I am sure that you've come across this page. As you may have noticed, there are almost no links to Intel components at all on that page. The majority of documentation is about AMD components, with VIA coming in as number two. There are also links to datasheets for various smaller superio components.
I think this should have been a clue to you that all vendors do not have exactly the same policy, and further I think it should have made you realize that Intel hardware may not be the best candidate if your desire is to study and learn about every register write that is performed in the coreboot code.
Now, the i945 code in coreboot is still there and still readable, even if it does not come with a book about how it was written and how it is structured. I don't think these things are really needed either. The code is really nicely written, function names are descriptive, and I believe that by cross-referencing the i945 code with datasheets for components from other vendors at a similar level of performance there is still a lot that you will be able to learn!
I assume that you have some plan for how to use your 4 KISS systems, and this is still very much possible of course. Since you have hardware that you can not study in detail maybe you can at least make good use of it by focusing more on what happens after coreboot, instead of what happens within coreboot if that is not something you can do without documentation in hand.
My plan was to gather a thorough knowledge of one example of Coreboot. I dislike much to deal with a subject which in incomplete.
Believe me when I say that no one board will be a good way to learn about all of coreboot. Over two hundred mainboards are supported by coreboot, and as you may learn there are immense differences between e.g. an Intel i945 platform, and an AMD GeodeLX platform. Just like with programming languages; any time you spend on one thing will help you become more proficient with programming in general.
I do not want to port Coreboot first. My immediate purpose was to study and become proficient in the subject. How I can port Coreboot without even knowing it and researching on it first.
The norm has been that people learn about coreboot while working on it. In my experience it is more difficult but more importantly extremely inefficient to learn about something without actually doing it. I'm a firm believer in learning by doing. Otherwise something may have been learned, but it will not neccessarily be understood.
If you have more of an academic inclination, then like others have mentioned, I think it would have been wise to ask questions, and ask the important questions. It seems to me that when you started with this project you needed to become more familiar among other things with GNU make, and that is just one of many tools which the coreboot project builds upon.
The fact that something as "simple" as the build system was already requiring learning more about some tool would have indicated to me that I would be forced to do a lot of research to really understand the project more completely.
At least you could add some lines about NDA story and incomplete data sheets in Wiki
I think this is a really good idea. On which page do you think it it would fit best? Datasheets? Documentation?
or you could made the following fact clear :
"Anybody who wants to study and learn Coreboot must know that the documentation of hardware is incomplete and there are some hidden cases which will never become clear!!"
This is not a fact at all. This is your assumption, and I'm afraid it isn't correct. If you look at the code for components from other vendors then I think you will discover that some do actually provide good and complete documentation. AMD really deserves a mention here. We all certainly wish that all documentation would be made available even sooner, so that coreboot no longer has to play catch-up with the market, but I think the trend is going the right way at AMD.
Linux Kernel
..
Coreboot is about BIOS
coreboot is about firmware, not BIOS. I don't know how many times I've expressed the significate difference between these two concepts.
They are in two different categories in my opinion.
You will find that many people disagree with that. A large part of Linux is it's device drivers. Try removing all device drivers from Linux and see what you have left. It's really not useful at all.
Maybe you have been keeping up-to-date with the situation of drivers for wireless networkinge devices in open source operating systems. This is an issue which is really close to people's everyday lives, and it has been a rather big challenge for all open source OSes. It's only very recently that Linux has actually managed to attract the vendors to *help* the project with code and maybe even documentation, but in general the situation has been exactly the same for a long time. I have a distinct memory of a presentation 7 years ago about difficulties faced by FreeBSD developers to learn about how to program these devices.
You never mentioned what your background is, and if you are used to a system like Microsoft Windows then I'm not surprised that you find the open source world very foreign, it is all about "owning the problem" and really making sure to do enough research in order to take inforfmed decisions. This of course requires information. If no information is available, then sure, it can feel like a hopeless situation, but for coreboot I can absolutely not agree with you that this would be the case.
Finally, there's of course always the possibility to do reverse engineering. But that is something that really requires skill, and extraordinary patience.
I do hope that you can still make use of your computers, even though you may not be able to find someone who can train you about the meaning of every register in them.
Kind regards
//Peter
I also would like to know what your goal is, this would probably make it much easyer to tell you what you need to know, instead of you complaning each time you find you need some thing you didn't know you needed when you started to do... somehting.
-Anders
I am afraid those unmentioned registers have a significant effect in understanding the function and logic of the internal parts of the IC and the standards used. First, one must study to know what is going on, how can i work without having enough information?! I am not going to keep on complaining but the "incomplete documentation" may be added to the first page of Wiki, in www.coreboot.org/Welcome_to_coreboot.
On Sat, Oct 2, 2010 at 10:55 PM, Anders Jenbo anders@jenbo.dk wrote:
I also would like to know what your goal is, this would probably make it much easyer to tell you what you need to know, instead of you complaning each time you find you need some thing you didn't know you needed when you started to do... somehting.
-Anders
-- coreboot mailing list: coreboot@coreboot.org http://www.coreboot.org/mailman/listinfo/coreboot
ali hagigat wrote:
I am afraid those unmentioned registers have a significant effect in understanding the function and logic of the internal parts of the IC and the standards used.
What function, logic and standards is it you want to understand better? We may be able to recommend some reading material. If it is anything but DMI or FSB then I am actually sure that we can do so. And if it *is* DMI or FSB then I would be curious to know why.
I'm not saying that it is, but if your mission is to create competing chipsets for Intel platforms then good luck to you, but I don't think you will find coreboot very helpful, specifically because Intel does not give out documentation freely. In that case I think you would have no option other than reverse engineering, and that's just a lot of wasted time IMO.
As Anders pointed out - we can only actually help you if you can say what it is that you want to do!
First, one must study to know what is going on, how can i work without having enough information?!
Personally I consider it critical to learn by experimentation, or empirical studies if you prefer. And again, I think knowing and understanding are two very different things.
I am not going to keep on complaining but the "incomplete documentation" may be added to the first page of Wiki, in www.coreboot.org/Welcome_to_coreboot.
I'm afraid I don't think that is a great idea, because I think the first page already has too much information.
You did not mention if you had seen the Documentation and Datasheets pages on the wiki. I think that the latter page in particular might be a good place to note that different vendors have different policy about public documentation, but honestly, I think it is very obvious already!
//Peter
On Sun, Oct 3, 2010 at 12:42 AM, Peter Stuge peter@stuge.se wrote:
ali hagigat wrote:
I am afraid those unmentioned registers have a significant effect in understanding the function and logic of the internal parts of the IC and the standards used.
What function, logic and standards is it you want to understand better? We may be able to recommend some reading material. If it is anything but DMI or FSB then I am actually sure that we can do so. And if it *is* DMI or FSB then I would be curious to know why.
I'm not saying that it is, but if your mission is to create competing chipsets for Intel platforms then good luck to you, but I don't think you will find coreboot very helpful, specifically because Intel does not give out documentation freely. In that case I think you would have no option other than reverse engineering, and that's just a lot of wasted time IMO.
As Anders pointed out - we can only actually help you if you can say what it is that you want to do!
First, one must study to know what is going on, how can i work without having enough information?!
Personally I consider it critical to learn by experimentation, or empirical studies if you prefer. And again, I think knowing and understanding are two very different things.
I am not going to keep on complaining but the "incomplete documentation" may be added to the first page of Wiki, in www.coreboot.org/Welcome_to_coreboot.
I'm afraid I don't think that is a great idea, because I think the first page already has too much information.
You did not mention if you had seen the Documentation and Datasheets pages on the wiki. I think that the latter page in particular might be a good place to note that different vendors have different policy about public documentation, but honestly, I think it is very obvious already!
//Peter
-- coreboot mailing list: coreboot@coreboot.org http://www.coreboot.org/mailman/listinfo/coreboot
Hello! Ali, have you mastered the art of installing any Linux distribution onto a PC? I got started in 1999 when they were beginning to move off of a pile of floppies for Slackware, (as described on the earlier releases.) to one or more single CDs. It is a pretty straight forward affair, the only issue that can surface besides configuring the necessary services, is to setup the boot methods. I mention that here because you did not state that either.
After that installing your needed programs, and source code for them. This is also the way Coreboot is pulled over.
If you haven't, then please do. The commands given in the Wiki that are necessary function for enabling us to understand your target(s) are also especially useful. Incidentally I do not reccomend Ubuntu, there are too many outstanding issues with it. Debian will work, up to a particular point. SuSe will definitely work as well. Slackware however is also perfectly suited as I have it running here.
Reason why I am bringing this up is that you have mentioned your targets, but you haven't mentioned what you're going to be using to build the image(s) with. Or, and this is quite significant, what your planned activities will be.
Please also understand that the documention presented here, http://www.coreboot.org/Datasheets provides an essential collection. The Intel stuff is limited to the publically acessible collections they have. The material which is given there for Intel should tell you everything you need to know. It might even tell you what's what on the different bridging hardware of the targets you are interested in making use of.
Sorry group if I spoke up out of turn, but I suddenly realized that he was in the exact same position I was in, shortly after discovering the ancestor to this group. ----- Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8@gmail.com "This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."
On Sat, Oct 2, 2010 at 3:19 AM, ali hagigat hagigatali@gmail.com wrote:
I understand that this can be frustrating, but it's something that the coreboot project has no control over. NDA stands for Non-Disclosure Agreement, which means that
At least you could add some lines about NDA story and incomplete data sheets in Wiki or you could made the following fact clear :
"Anybody who wants to study and learn Coreboot must know that the documentation of hardware is incomplete and there are some hidden cases which will never become clear!!"
Check out some of the AMD and VIA platforms supported by Coreboot. Those vendors have been very helpful in contributing code and opening documentation necessary to bootstrap their hardware. It's sad that Intel has not done the same, not even for UEFI, however that is their prerogative.
-
ali hagigat -
Anders Jenbo -
David Hendricks -
Gregg Levine -
Peter Stuge -
ron minnich