On Mon, 28 Feb 2000, Burl Nyswonger wrote:
when you say super socket 7 chipsets -- does this include AMD? edwin
I meant "Super Socket 7 boards" in general -- ie: the Asus P5 series, Acer boards (obviously), etc... When I say "Aladdin V Chipset", I am referring
OK, this brings up an interesting issue for the OpenBIOS community. At least one Socket 7 motherboard will support either alpha or pentium in the socket. So it's the same motherboard with a different processor. All startup tasks for the motherboard are pretty much the same.
I had an interesting set of discussions with vendors at extreme linux last week. There's a lot of interest in linuxbios -- from Alpha motherboards too (the alpha bios'es all have sucked very badly -- dec never got it right).
As things stand openbios is too pentium-specific. So I'd like to propose an idea.
1) get into protected mode early 2) get rid of as much assembly as possible there's a lot that can move to C
so we change the layout a bit. It's still early in the game, we can do this.
A possible layout:
bios/arch/i386/{poweron.s,protected_mode.s,memory.s,motherboard.c,boot.c} bios/arch/alpha/{poweron.s,protected_mode.s,memory.s,motherboard.c,boot.c} bios/payload/{your c files here}
poweron.s is the very first set of things you do on poweron -- should be a few instructions. protected_mode.s bumps you into protected mode. On the pentium this is a few instructions. memory.s turns on memory -- this is *much* easier on the pentium in protected mode. memory.s should set up a stack and jump to C code. Motherboard.c does anything that has to be done to further use the motherboard. Boot.c gunzips the payload (either a bios-compatible code or Linux or FreeBSD or whatever) and jumps to it.
I'm talking to a commercial company that is going to do something like this -- they don't want much assembly long-term, so they're recrafting openbios. I don't think most people want to do assembly.
If we do this, we're not just for pentiums any more. That would be wonderful! Any interest?
ron
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