[coreboot] coccinelle project for i915 graphics driver for coreboot

[Kevin O'Connor]

On Mon, Apr 09, 2012 at 11:30:34AM -0700, ron minnich wrote:
> I'm trying an experiment and I welcome anyone who wants to help.
> 
> It's a simple idea motivated by a very hard problem. The problem is
> that we have unending problems with binary video bioses. We'd like to
> get to a source based video bios on, e.g., chromebook.
[...]
> Now why do it this way? Why not just do a one time hack of the driver
> code to a coreboot driver?

One possibility would be to create your own VGA BIOS with the
SeaVGABIOS code.  This has been done for Geode vga.  I'm not familiar
with the i915 chipset, but there's a chance that you just need to copy
the C initialization code over.

The vga bios isn't inherently slow - it's just poorly coded
implementations that make them slow.

>The reason is that the driver keeps
> changing and getting bug fixes. It most recently got some very useful
> fixes to the GMBUS driver. We want those fixes but the structure of
> the code changed a lot.

Not sure the above would help here.  If the vga support is needed just
for early debug printing, what's the gain in closely tracking
upstream?

-Kevin