[coreboot] [v2] r4745 - in trunk/coreboot-v2/src/cpu/intel: socket_PGA370 socket_mPGA479M socket_mPGA604

[Stefan Reinauer]

Peter Stuge wrote:

>> I see the correctness of our CPU model being compromised here..
>>     
>
> Please write a little about sockets vs. CPUs?
>
> Why is there a socket?
>
> What are sockets used for?
> (Grouping CPUs is not the answer I'm hoping for.)
>   

When you describe a mainboard (think devicetree.lb), you usually don't
have a CPU on there, but a socket.

There is a certain choice of CPUs you can put into that socket. The
socket decides which CPU drivers to
include in the coreboot image. These drivers include
 - MSR setup
 - microcode updates
 - power management setup
 - cache setup

Especially due to microcode it's not possible to make this completely
generic: All microcode for all Intel CPUs alone is more than 500kb

It's less about grouping CPUs but more about a clean device model. If we
want coreboot to be easily understandable, we need to make it reflect
what hardware looks like, logically. I think Ron has brought up some
pretty good reasons for moving the CPU capabilities into the sockets
(Which is a hack we need because of romcc - Enabling MMX and SSE per
socket is only needed because romcc needs to work without cache or
memory. We might want to add that as a comment to the socket Kconfig)

Stefan

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