One ROM for multiple devices - SeaBIOS

12 Jun 2012


      Please be aware that this is cross-posted to both the SeaBIOS and coreboot
mailing lists.  I know this is generally frowned upon, but I believe the
subject is valid for discussion in both forums.
I have a coreboot/SeaBIOS image containing an option ROM that works for
multiple graphics devices (seven or eight of them).  These graphics devices
come from the same vendor but each device has its own (unique) PCI Device
ID.  If I'm going to load the driver from SeaBIOS, I need to have a copy of
the option ROM file, each with the name of the target PCI device (e.g.
"pci1234,5678.rom").  Having seven or eight copies in the BIOS image file is
a waste of space.
Stefan R. submitted a solution to coreboot to enable mapping one ROM's
vendor/device ID to another and this solution has worked well for
coreboot-centric uses.
Unfortunately, this does not address the problem in SeaBIOS.  I have started
working on a solution that extends what Stefan has done, but moves the data
into a single "translate" file in CBFS.  This file contains simple data to
allow coreboot and/or SeaBIOS to take a PCI device's vendor/device info and
retrieve alternate vendor/device values.
Since both coreboot and SeaBIOS understand CBFS, the basic translation code
would be identical.
The data file consists of sets of four 16-bit binary values:
    u16 vendor1, device1; // translate FROM this PCI v/d
    u16 vendor2, device2; // translate TO this PCI v/d
If you have a single ROM which could support three devices, you would have
two sets of data:
    0x1234, 0x0001, 0x1234, 0x0002
    0x1234, 0x0001, 0x1234, 0x0003
This data would let the ROM for vendor 0x1234, device 0x0001 support devices
0x0002 and 0x0003.  NOTE: there is no data for device 0x0001, since it would
be handled without translation.
The code would work something like this:
    sprintf(name, "pci%04x,%04x.rom", pci->vendor, pci->device);
    rom = cbfs_findfile(name); // load the file
    if (!rom) {
        // ROM not found... try translation
        ven = pci->vendor;
        dev = pci->device;
        if (translate_findFirst(&ven, &dev)) {
            do {
                sprintf(name, "pci%04x,%04x.rom", ven, dev);
                rom = cbfs_findfile(name); // load the file
            while ((rom == null) && translate_findNext(&ven, &dev));
        }
    }
I'm not tied to the findFirst/findNext mechanism nor to the specific format
of the data.  What I would like to see is some mechanism in both coreboot
and SeaBIOS that would allow a given ROM to be used for multiple devices.
In coreboot this would affect the map_oprom_vendev() function.
In SeaBIOS this would affect both lookup_hardcode() and map_pcirom().
Since this problem exists in both codebases, is it reasonable to come up
with a solution that will work in both codebases?
Thoughts?
            -- Steve G.