Why bios(generic) is slow?

Ronald G. Minnich rminnich at lanl.gov
Sun Dec 29 17:21:00 CET 2002


On Sun, 29 Dec 2002, Andrew Kohlsmith wrote:
> Actually that brings up a few questions I had about the 430TX chipset
> support in LinuxBIOS...  The DRAM initialization seems to be utterly
> mangled, with Eric's code winning out (since it seems to work.  :-) --
> but I have seen a few register initializations which I haven't been able
> to find in my 430TX documentation.

it's a mess, due to 430tx bugs and problems and doc errors, and the fact 
that the chipset is seeing so little use nowadays that almost nobody 
cares. But a clean implementation would still be of interest.

> Things like register 0x90 (in raminit.inc it's called "Error Control 
> Register") and using eight read cycles to reset either the memory or the 
> controller, I'm not sure...  Does anyone have any recollection of where this 
> type of information was found?  

trial and error and error and error and ... until it worked. Then we 
stopped and moved on to other things and never got back to it.

> If I do a (fairly large) cleanup of the 430TX ram init code, would it be
> accepted into CVS or is it how it is for specific reasons?

If it doesn't break anything like the smartcore-p5 we'll take it. 

ron




More information about the coreboot mailing list