Hammer Documentation is now Available at AMD's website

[Eric W. Biederman]

"Thomas J. Merritt" <tjm at codegen.com> writes:

> |<><><><><> Original message from Eric W. Biederman  <><><><><>
> |So far I have just skimmed the Documentation but it appears that
> |AMD has now publicly published everything needed to do  Hammer
> |LinuxBIOS port.
> |
> |No great surprise but it is nice to actually see it !
> |
> |Yeah!  The chaos with the Dual Athlons has finally paid off :)
> 
> It does appear that they have released all of the documentation 
> necessary.  The learning curve is pretty steep though.  There are
> a lot of registers to program to make a box sing.  We have been
> able to bring SmartFirmware up on our AMD Solo box.  It has taken
> about 5 months to get to the point that we can now boot NetBSD.
> We're currently unable to boot Linux, but making progress on that front.

Hmm.  I wonder if that is because of the open firmware chaos.
So far I have not seen anything out of the ordinary in the way of
a learning curve, and I just booted a linux kernel.

> On the LinuxBIOS front we're planning to leverage our x86-64 experience
> and provide commercial support for LinuxBIOS on AMD64 processors.  
> With AMD's public release of the processor and chipset documentation we
> should be releived of most of our NDA obligations, and this will now
> become possible.  If anyone has hardware and is contemplating bring up
> LinuxBIOS please let me know, since I don't want to duplicate effort if
> we can avoid it.

You have heard the talk about the freebios2 tree?

Anyway Stefan Reinauer at SuSe and I are busily bringing it up.
So far so good.  We are still in the stage where you hard code things,
so you know you understand what registers need to be programmed,
but everything has been straight forward so far.

Eric