[coreboot] [PATCH] (somewhat) clean up intel southbridge drivers

Uwe Hermann uwe at hermann-uwe.de
Mon Feb 22 15:57:10 CET 2010


On Sat, Feb 20, 2010 at 11:32:45PM +0100, Stefan Reinauer wrote:
> Hi there,
> 
> the intel southbridge drivers are a mess.

Ack.

 
> Why? Because it is simply unmaintainable. The unified driver is not
> unified, it's rather incomplete enough so nobody noticed. The ICH4 and
> ICH4M are very similar. So are the ICH5 and ICH5M and ICH5R. It's a good
> idea to have a "unified" driver per chipset generation. But not across
> several generations of chipsets.

Hm, I think you're right.


> So folks, if you agree that we should clean up coreboot and make it
> easier for people, send me an Acked-by: for the above idea.
> 
> Signed-off-by: Stefan Reinauer <stepan at coresystems.de>

Acked-by: Uwe Hermann <uwe at hermann-uwe.de>


However, there are some follow-up TODOs. All of those SBs have missing
license headers and partly inconsistent coding-style (which is to be
expected though, as the coding guidelines were not in place back then).
I might be able to take care of that sooner or later, but any help is
welcome.

My main worry with this kind of stuff is that we get a certain degree of
code duplication. As you correctly noted some of that just _looks_
duplicated as the i82801xx driver is incomplete. But there's also stuff
which _is_ generic for most ICHs. Maybe we can later factor out some of
that to some ichlib.c or something like that. For example the code in
i82801*_early_smbus.c is likely a good candidate (didn't check the
datasheets closely yet, though).


Uwe.
-- 
http://www.hermann-uwe.de  | http://www.randomprojects.org
http://www.crazy-hacks.org | http://www.unmaintained-free-software.org




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