[LinuxBIOS] Geode SC22000

Stefan Reinauer stepan at openbios.org
Tue Apr 4 01:06:19 CEST 2006


* Per Hallsmark <perh at t2data.se> [060403 10:19]:
> Stefan, thanks for you answers. I'm still a bit puzzled though
> why PPC, ARM, XScale, MIPS manages same thing without romcc or similar.

Cache-As-Ram works reliably on most platforms and it is definitely the
way to go. Romcc helps in cases where we don't have that, so we get
something up easily. On PPC it just works I think. Arm and Mips are not
supported in LinuxBIOS yet, but many of these systems (embedded and/or
with a fixed amount of memory soldered on) are a lot easier to set up
than the x86 (-64) boxes we support in LinuxBIOS.

> Is memory setup done so very much different and is so much more
> complex in x86? For my port, SC2200, it looks about same to me.

It is pretty complex on AMD64 which was the reason for romcc. And since
its there we use it to make readable C code rather than Assembler init
code. It's a matter of maintainability and ease of use. 100 lines of C
are easier to read than 100 lines of Assembler. Well, for most of us.

> (could be because of my embedded background, most targets have
>  had defined memory size so mem sizing isn't a problem...)
 
Yeah, with a fixed memory size the ram initialization is more or less
poking some values into some machine specific registers. There you dont
even gain a lot of readability with C. 
But imagine you read the SPD rom sitting on each DDR Ram module and you
have to find out how many rows and columns it is, find a timing
supported by all installed modules and generate values that the chipset
understands.
And then something doesnt work and you want to output some debugging
information but your functions are tight in registers (which is usually
the case on x86 machines) so you have to reorganize lots of your code.

romcc does that. It's a great tool. But in a "perfect world" we would
not need it ;-)

Stefan








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