[coreboot] elf payload legacybios - boots on v3 in qemu

[Rudolf Marek]

Hi all,
>> I strongly prefer b) above over anything else. I specifically do not
>> want coreboot to know about BIOS tables. coreboot already exports
>> some information. If legacybios needs more information, let's add
>> that to the coreboot tables.
> 
> What you're proposing here is that the payload build all the standard
> bios tables - mptable, pir, e820 map, smbios, acpi.  I'm okay with
> this - it makes sense to me.  However, I didn't get the feeling there
> was a general consensus that this logic should move from coreboot to
> the payloads.

Hmm this is difficult. ACPI is very very complex and if we ever want Suspend to 
RAM etc then it is inevitable. ACPI is *NOT* legacy. It contains lot of info 
specific to board/chipset and also about *currently* installed CPU.

So I think legacybios should create the ACPI/MPTABLE/etc when in emulation mode. 
Otherwise coreboot should handle PIR, MPTABLE + ACPI. The memory map shall be 
transfered with the coreboot tables. The legacybios can do e820 map from those 
tables - like FILO does imho.

The trick would be to mark for legacy bios what parts of region 0xf0000-0xfffff 
are used with the tables already. Or lets say we can put all stuff in first 
32kb. second 32kb for legacy bios. Certainly this solution is not cleanest but I 
think it will work. If coreboot needs more space it can steal some other memory. 
E.G start with ACPI tables on 0xe0000 and mark it reserved.

There is also problem with SMM code. I think coreboot should have at least 
handler which returns from SMM and increases some counter. Better then for 
example when HW monitoring chip triggers SMI because fans runs too slow and 
freezes the machine because the CPU jumps to nowhere. And also C1E cannot be 
implemented without SMM. So coreboot should place some SMM handler to some 
memory too - like ACPI and other tables.

Kevin, does the legacy bios work somehow with coreboot already? Does it have 
support for IDE on PCI bars :) ?

Thanks,
Rudolf