AW: [OpenBIOS] Aladdin V chipset
Burl Nyswonger
burl at watchguard.com
Tue Feb 29 12:14:46 CET 2000
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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