[LinuxBIOS] 440bx stuff

Johan Rydberg jrydberg at gnu.org
Tue Nov 7 14:28:05 CET 2006


Stefan Reinauer <stepan at coresystems.de> writes:

>> I'm curious, is there any way to test the code through software,
>> without a flash? 
>
> Not for this part of the code. Software emulations dont emulate the
> chipset well enough to find out whether your code does the right thing. 
> Unless you are using SimNow to simulate an AMD system. Dont know if
> something like this exists for Intel CPUs though.

I would say that this is a shame.  We really need a top-notch full
system simulator.  But doing complete and correct simulation of
chipsets is hard, error prone and quite boring.  Therefor emulators
like QEMU take the short path, and put in a "phony" BIOS and more or
less do not implement a northbridge at all.

What we need is a full-system simulator with the following
characteristics;

 * correct,
 * deterministic,
 * visible device state,
 * visible cpu state,
 * scriptable,
 * and pluggable (for profiling and coverage tools)

Note that I have not put "fast" on the list.  I think that is
secondary for our use case.  

~j
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