[OpenBIOS] Bootloader

[Samuel Rydh]

On Tue, Jan 06, 2004 at 03:41:13PM +0100, Stefan Reinauer wrote:
> * Samuel Rydh <samuel at ibrium.se> [040106 15:37]:
> > > Everything that is needed has already been merged into the OpenBIOS tree
> > > (currently only in BK, not in CVS)
> > > The ppc architecture code of OpenBIOS already has a dummy target for an
> > > MPC107 board, like the Embedded Planet EP405pc which is supported by
> > > LinuxBIOS. It probably needs some fiddling to get everything working on
> > > real hardware, but we're really close now..
> > > If somebody wants to look at this, please do!
> > 
> > I actually have the MPC107 board I added that target for (a PowerPC 750 CPU
> > on a PCI card). I wrote the POST stuff for it some time ago so it should
> > be simple enough to get OpenBIOS running on it.
>   
> We still need a PCI driver though to get FCode supported components to
> really work

Actually, in this particular case this is not really needed. The board
is not supposed to access other PCI devices since that would interfere
with the main system.

One has to write a custom drivers though (a simple tty driver for instance)
and eventually a video driver (the card can access main memory so one just needs
to reserve a piece of main memory and write a linux side client to
display it). It is even possible to bus master directly to the VGA
card although one would have to be a bit careful with locking issues etc.

Btw. MOL fully emulates the PCI bus (including BAR relocation and
FCODE roms) so it should be simple enough to test the PCI (when
implemented) in MOL.

/Samule