[OpenBIOS] OpenBIOS and ppc64?

[Benjamin Herrenschmidt]

On Fri, 2010-10-01 at 00:03 +0200, Alexander Graf wrote:

> If I understand the U3 and U4 designs correctly, PCI is always bound
> to be within the first 32 bits. Copying Ben for verification. I don't
> really remember having seen 64 bit cells on any Power system either,
> but I could be wrong. Again, let's ask the expert here :).

Yes. However, on js2x, the firmware plays funny remapping tricks...

In general, however, OpenBIOS should be fixed. It's getting more common
to have even 32-bit machines with physical devices above 32-bit (even
ARM is now growing an equivalent of PAE for that, and almost all 4xx
powerpc do that).

> > What's the plan for fixing this? Will we need an openbios-ppc64
> after all, or is there a way to fix these issues in openbios-ppc using
> uint64_t and some assembler magic? The 970 init
> (arch/ppc/qemu/init.c:ppc64_patch_handlers) apparently does something
> clever for the interrupt handlers and seems able to use 64-bit ld/std
> instructions in start.S. That still wouldn't help with ucell based
> structs and C functions of course...
> 
> Those are pure fixups to get back to 32 bit mode from the interrupt
> handlers, as they go into 64 bit mode by default.

OpenBIOS should be generally fixed regardless of being 32 or 64-bit for
being capable of handling 64-bit physical addresses. As to accessing
those from 32-bit mode, for that I suppose it either

 - runs in virtual mode exclusively on such machines so it can create
special mappings in the MMU (4xx)

 - use a little asm stub that switch mode & back on real 64-bit machines
to access locations in the 64-bit address space

I'm no fan of the later due to the "issues" with doing I/Os in real mode
on many powerpc chips but that's how IBM own firmware works so ..

Cheers,
Ben.

> 
> Alex
> 
> > 
> > Regards,
> > 
> > Andreas
> > 
> > [1]
> http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=73270
> > [2] http://www.tibit.org/ppc/
> >