[coreboot] [PATCH] don't print too early on mcp55-based boards

[Ward Vandewege]

On Tue, Nov 02, 2010 at 11:20:43PM +0100, Uwe Hermann wrote:
> I don't object to the patch, and we should probably fix this in all
> other southbridges, I think the same problem applies there.
> 
> But: the die() call itself also does a printk(), so that'll still hang
> if the error path is chosen (at that point it probably doesn't matter
> much, though, as we die anyway).

Right, I think it does not matter. If the die happens when printk is already
functional, great, if not it will hang there which is fine.

> I also agree that die() should have a POST code, preferrably something
> easy to remember. It already has a commented-out "//post_code(0xff);".
> Not sure why it's disabled, but I think it should be something other
> than 0xff, that's a bit too "special" for my taste.
> 
> We have "0xee: Not supposed to get here" as per documentation/POSTCODES,
> so maybe we can use 0xdd ("d" as in die), if that's not already used elsewhere.

So, thinking about this a little more, I'm not sure adding a post code to
'die' is a good idea. The problem with doing that is that it would clobber
any previous post codes, which might be a better indicator for what's going
wrong.

Perhaps a good way to deal with fatal runtime error conditions would be

  a) set a unique post code
  b) call die

in the assumption that die does not clobber the post code.

What do you think?

Thanks,
Ward.

-- 
Ward Vandewege <ward at fsf.org>
Free Software Foundation - Senior Systems Administrator