[LinuxBIOS] GX2 status

[Ronald G Minnich]

Richard Smith wrote:

> Good plan.  The inclusion of yet another hunk of 16-bit binary code in
> to the mix doesn't seem like a good long-term plan.  We have enough
> trouble with the VGA binaries.

we did confirm during our discussions last week that there is nothing in 
principle that disallows SMI in 32-bit mode. So we could do the same 
trick we do for vgabios, where we pop into 32 bit from 16 bit mode (yes, 
I wrote that correctly!) and back to 16-bit mode for returning from SMI.

The better option is to write adapters for linuxbios and linux that use 
the GX2 MSRs directly and don't try to use 0xcfc/0xcf8 for PCI 
enumeration etc. But we'd have to convince linux, plan 9, bsd, etc. to 
pick this up ... that's definitely a longer-term issue. But I do think 
that, in the long run, we don't absolutely have to have vsa and SMI Int 
at all.

ron