Aladdin V chipset

[Burl Nyswonger]

I have begun to hack on OpenBIOS and am looking to add support for x86 and
the Aladdin V chipset (ie: Super Socket7, Asus P5A, etc...).  If anyone
else has started work on this, or plans to, it would be nice to talk.

-- Burl.

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[Ronald G. Minnich]

On Sat, 26 Feb 2000, Burl Nyswonger wrote:
> I have begun to hack on OpenBIOS and am looking to add support for x86 and
> the Aladdin V chipset (ie: Super Socket7, Asus P5A, etc...).  If anyone
> else has started work on this, or plans to, it would be nice to talk.

A good first start is to post URLs for the hardware. I'd like to see how
it works and may be able to offer hints from what I've learned.

thanks
ron

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[Burl Nyswonger]

On Sat, 26 Feb 2000, Ronald G. Minnich wrote:
> On Sat, 26 Feb 2000, Burl Nyswonger wrote:

[...]
> A good first start is to post URLs for the hardware. I'd like to see how
> it works and may be able to offer hints from what I've learned.

I am hacking on an off-the-shelf Asus P5A-B motherboard.  Its a standard
PC board.  It uses an M1542 and an M1543C (North and South/SuperIO
respectivly).  (http://www.asus.com)

This chipset is pretty common in x86 "Super-7 motherboards".

-- Burl.
> thanks
> ron
>
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[Edwin Rhodes]

cool, will you add support for AMD processors? ie k5 and k6 etc?

good luck,

edwin

----- Original Message -----
From: Burl Nyswonger 
To: 
Sent: Saturday, February 26, 2000 9:30 AM
Subject: [OpenBIOS] Aladdin V chipset
> I have begun to hack on OpenBIOS and am looking to add support for x86 and
> the Aladdin V chipset (ie: Super Socket7, Asus P5A, etc...).  If anyone
> else has started work on this, or plans to, it would be nice to talk.
>
> -- Burl.
>
> To unsubscribe: send mail to [e-mail]
> with 'unsubscribe openbios' in the body of the message

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AW: Aladdin V chipset

[Stephan Müller]

> cool, will you add support for AMD processors? ie k5 and k6 etc?

What does a processor in sockel7-architecture has to do with the chipset?
OpenBIOS is a x86-bios, so every x86-cpu (depending on of there's support
for your particular chipset) can be used. The k5/k6 are basically the same
as normal pentium-cpus, they will, of course, run with this code.

Ciao,
    Stephan
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AW: Aladdin V chipset

[Ronald G. Minnich]

On Tue, 29 Feb 2000, [iso-8859-1] Stephan M�ller wrote:
> What does a processor in sockel7-architecture has to do with the chipset?

well there are the occasional differences that crop up on power-up. There
are interesting differences in MTRR and other such things. We'll figure
these out though.

ron

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AW: Aladdin V chipset

Ronald G. Minnich  wrote:
> > What does a processor in sockel7-architecture has to do with the chipset?
>
> well there are the occasional differences that crop up on power-up. There
> are interesting differences in MTRR and other such things. We'll figure
> these out though.

Setting up the MTRRs should be left to the kernel IMHO.
They have a fine tuned driver there for sometime.

OpenBIOS should just initialise them to a sane state, and leave things at that.
Or is that what you meant ?

AW: Aladdin V chipset

[Ronald G. Minnich]

On 29 Feb 2000, Dave Jones wrote:
> OpenBIOS should just initialise them to a sane state, and leave things
> at that. Or is that what you meant ?

you're right. we don't want to touch MTRRs. But from a powered-off state
there are things in the different CPUs that have to be handled in
openbios, that are not apparent now.

ron

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AW: Aladdin V chipset

[Burl Nyswonger]

On Tue, 29 Feb 2000, [iso-8859-1] Stephan M�ller wrote:
> > cool, will you add support for AMD processors? ie k5 and k6 etc?
>
> What does a processor in sockel7-architecture has to do with the chipset?

[...]

I think what was being asked was along the lines of whether or not I would
be adding support for the piculuarities of the K5, K6, etc...  And the
answer is "sort-of".  The M1541 has special hardware support for
enabling/disabling features that can exploit the slightly different
architecture of the various x86 processors, ie:

- Cyrix M1/2 linear wrap mode
    - K6 Write-allocation

Etc... I actually have no idea what these things are specifically, but
they are listed as features of the M1531B...

Most PC BIOS (ie: Award, AMI) will turn on the chipset support for these
things if the right processor is detected.

I think that is a great idea, but it is something I feel is better left to
a much higher layer of the OpenBIOS architecture.  The way I see it, the
support for a chipset like this should be done in two layers:

1) low-level (ie: boot16 and boot32 "level" code)  Definetly
       some assembly here, and perhaps some C code.  Do the minimum
       required to make the chipset provide a linear address space, 
       set up some stacks, etc...

2) high-level (ie: C and Forth) -- It would be nice if there
       could be some way to abstract the chipset "advanced" features
       into the OpenFirmware device tree.  If not, this is still
       where I think the "performance" related chipset initialization
       should happen.

-- Burl.
> Ciao,
>    Stephan
>
> To unsubscribe: send mail to [e-mail]
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AW: Aladdin V chipset

Stephan M|ller  wrote:
> > cool, will you add support for AMD processors? ie k5 and k6 etc?
>
> What does a processor in sockel7-architecture has to do with the chipset?
> OpenBIOS is a x86-bios, so every x86-cpu (depending on of there's support
> for your particular chipset) can be used. The k5/k6 are basically the same
> as normal pentium-cpus, they will, of course, run with this code.

There should be some AMD (and other vendor) specific code, to enable features,
MTRRs, setup cpuid to return correct values etc..

Read the BIOS writers guide for pretty much any non-Intel CPU vendor,
and you'll get the idea.

To answer the original posters question, I think we should support as many
different CPUs as possible. It's not easy to do such stuff in anything other
than asm though, which it appears (to me at least) that Ron is trying to steer
OpenBIOS away from.

Some of these things are already present in the kernel
(check out arch/i386/kernel/setup.c). The question is, would it be better in
the kernelspace, or BIOSspace. Which is more precious? :)
The other question, is that as not everyone will be using OpenBIOS, so maybe it
would be better in kernel. Better still would be a generic interface to MSRs
in kernel space, that a userspace app could then turn on caches etc...
Many people (myself included) have sent Linus drivers for MSR interfaces in the
past, but he seems reluctant to include them. Maybe now that devfs is in 2.3.x,
someone will have more luck creating a /dev/cpu/msr/ interface. In which case,
this whole discussion is moot.

regards,

[Edwin Rhodes]

when you say super socket 7 chipsets -- does this include AMD?
edwin

----- Original Message -----
From: Burl Nyswonger 
To: 
Sent: Saturday, February 26, 2000 9:30 AM
Subject: [OpenBIOS] Aladdin V chipset
> I have begun to hack on OpenBIOS and am looking to add support for x86 and
> the Aladdin V chipset (ie: Super Socket7, Asus P5A, etc...).  If anyone
> else has started work on this, or plans to, it would be nice to talk.
>
> -- Burl.
>
> To unsubscribe: send mail to [e-mail]
> with 'unsubscribe openbios' in the body of the message

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[Burl Nyswonger]

On Mon, 28 Feb 2000, Edwin Rhodes 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
specifically to the ALI M1541/2 Northbridge and the M1543C
Southbridge/SuperIO chips made by Aladdin (http://www.ali.com.tw).

-- Burl.
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Burl Nyswonger 
> To: 
> Sent: Saturday, February 26, 2000 9:30 AM
> Subject: [OpenBIOS] Aladdin V chipset
> > I have begun to hack on OpenBIOS and am looking to add support for x86 and
> > the Aladdin V chipset (ie: Super Socket7, Asus P5A, etc...).  If anyone
> > else has started work on this, or plans to, it would be nice to talk.
> >
> > -- Burl.
> >
> > To unsubscribe: send mail to [e-mail]
> > with 'unsubscribe openbios' in the body of the message
>
> To unsubscribe: send mail to [e-mail]
> with 'unsubscribe openbios' in the body of the message

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