Re: [OpenBIOS] Aladdin V chipset

[Ronald G. Minnich]

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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