[linuxBios] HDD init problem

Eric W. Biederman ebiederman at lnxi.com
Thu May 29 08:23:00 CEST 2003


Greg Watson <gwatson at lanl.gov> writes:

> No, I'm just working on pc80/ide/ide.c in the linuxbios tree. I need this for
> the PPC port, so x86 asm code won't be of much help.

Please look at src/drivers/disk/ide_disk.c in a etherboot-5.1 tree.
It is a simpler and more correct driver.   In some sense it is a derivative
of pc80/ide/ide.c, as much as a complete rewrite can be derivative code.
And there is no x86 asm.

The important thing is the etherboot driver gets the ide spin up case
correct.  And it seems to handle a wider range of drives.

Porting the etherboot driver back into LinuxBIOS is one of the todo
list items.  If you are brave a port of etherboot to the ppc would
not be rejected.  The only big problem is that etherboot currently
does not run on any big endian architectures so there may be some
endian problems in the etherboot code.  Of course for most cases
a little endian architecture is more likely to show problems so there
should not be too many problems.  The alignment problems should already
be handled by the Itanium port.

The cute thing of course would be to get openbios or some other
implementation of open firmware running on top of LinuxBIOS.  Giving linuxbios
backwards compatibility on both Macs and PCs.

Eric




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