[coreboot] AppleTV development
Scott D. Davilla
davilla at 4pi.com
Wed Jun 18 19:53:59 CEST 2008
Hello all,
I'm the author of atv-bootloader which enabled booting of
standard un-patched Linux kernels on AppleTV hardware.
For background, the AppleTV uses a pure EFI bios which uses boot.efi
to boot a OSX darwin kernel. The EFI firmware does cert checking
which prevents the use of rEFIt as a bootloader so a fake darwin
kernel (mach_kernel) was created to act as a secondary bootloader.
I've extended this secondary bootloader (my work is atv-bootloader)
to remove the nasty kernel patches by translating the EFI memory map
into an E820 memory map and relocating ACPI and SMBIOS table pointers
to where Linux can find them. In addition, since video is presented
as a linear console frame buffer, I setup Linux boot params for a
vesafb.
A custom Linux kernel/initramfs is embedded into the secondary
bootloader. This kernel/initramsfs then finds and loads the real
kernel using kexec. The reason for the initial kernel is USB 2.0
support. It was easier to do it this way than add all the required
bits to support USB 2.0.
This all works pretty well and the nvidia binary driver see and
correctly uses the nvidia 7300 chipset for 720p/1080i XvMC hardware
decode. So for about $230, the AppleTV is about the least expensive
hardware platform for handling 720p/1080i mpeg2 video content.
One of the current issues is that since the AppleTV is pure EFI, that
means no PC-bios and vbios is not in the typical locations so video
resolution changes can only be handled by the nvidia binary driver
under X11.
I've recently found where vbios is located and have been able to copy
it to 0xC0000 and run the standard "nv" X11 driver. When running "nv"
I can even POST it using testbios.
The plan is to have the secondary bootloader relocate vbios and POST
it in prep for Linux. This involves patching in software/hardware
interrupt handlers (remember no PC-bios). Since I'm not a
pc-bios/vbios expert this is where the fun starts.
The other thought is to go all the way and do a PC-bios layer
complete with vbios handling.
ADLO seems interesting. The secondary bootloader is running in
protected mode so it could load the ADLO payload and launch it.
Coreboot and it's associated projects is the closest development
effort that involved pc-bios/vbios work so I'd like to get some
comments or suggestions.
Thanks
Scott
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