AW: [OpenBIOS] Aladdin V chipset

[Burl Nyswonger]

On Tue, 29 Feb 2000, [iso-8859-1] Stephan Müller wrote:

> > cool, will you add support for AMD processors? ie k5 and k6 etc?
> What does a processor in sockel7-architecture has to do with the chipset?
[...]

I think what was being asked was along the lines of whether or not I would
be adding support for the piculuarities of the K5, K6, etc...  And the
answer is "sort-of".  The M1541 has special hardware support for
enabling/disabling features that can exploit the slightly different
architecture of the various x86 processors, ie:

	- Cyrix M1/2 linear wrap mode
	- K6 Write-allocation

Etc... I actually have no idea what these things are specifically, but
they are listed as features of the M1531B...

Most PC BIOS (ie: Award, AMI) will turn on the chipset support for these
things if the right processor is detected.

I think that is a great idea, but it is something I feel is better left to
a much higher layer of the OpenBIOS architecture.  The way I see it, the
support for a chipset like this should be done in two layers:

	1) low-level (ie: boot16 and boot32 "level" code)  Definetly
	   some assembly here, and perhaps some C code.  Do the minimum
	   required to make the chipset provide a linear address space, 
	   set up some stacks, etc...  

	2) high-level (ie: C and Forth) -- It would be nice if there
	   could be some way to abstract the chipset "advanced" features
 	   into the OpenFirmware device tree.  If not, this is still
	   where I think the "performance" related chipset initialization
	   should happen.

-- Burl. 

> Ciao,
> 	Stephan
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