Hi,
AFAIK latest seabios already supports DMA. It's easy to add more config options for seabios if you are so inclined.
Yes, I tried that, the fw_cfg overhead in SeaBios/linuxboot optrom is already not a big issue for us. However, there are still some other code in SeaBIOS needs to be investigated.
What exactly?
Also a few suggestions: * Try the seabios master branch. There have been some improvements recently which are not in the 1.9 release. * Use a stripped down config. When booting a kernel directly you don't need storage and usb drivers, also no keyboard. That all reduces init time. * Initializing all pci devices (placing bars in address space and programming them) can probably be skipped and left to the linux kernel to handle. But when trying take care that the effect might be that we shift just startup time from seabios to linux kernel, the placement needs to happen somewhere after all. * When discussing these things add the seabios list (seabios@seabios.org) to cc: Added the list now.
cheers, Gerd
Gerd Hoffmann wrote:
- Initializing all pci devices (placing bars in address space and programming them) can probably be skipped and left to the linux kernel to handle.
When the coreboot project started out, in 1999, that turned out not to be the case. I don't know if the situation has improved since then.
//Peter
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Gerd Hoffmann -
Peter Stuge