[PROPOSAL] extended payload handling

[Eric W. Biederman]

Stefan Reinauer <stepan at openbios.org> writes:

> * Greg Watson <gwatson at lanl.gov> [040608 18:33]:
> > 
> > PCI device code and resource information should be available for 
> > payloads to use. A payload should not have to re-probe for devices on 
> > the PCI bus.
> 
> I fully agree. That information should go to the LB table. 

That has been the tentative plan for quite a while.  So far
I have just had more pressing concerns and no immediate need
so I haven't implemented it.

> OTOH it would be a nice option to leave the whole pci device probing
> away if one happens to have a payload that does this already. 

Probing is not the interesting thing in LinuxBIOS the interesting
thing is resource allocation.  And with OpenFirmware doing it I can
see some point in not predoing it.  But the pci enumeration is quite
cheap so I don't see that it would be much of a problem, especially
as it allows us to concentrate the board specific information in
LinuxBIOS.

What is gained most by exporting this in the LinuxBIOS table is
avoiding broken PCI devices.  And possibly some information about
non-standard PCI bars.

Eric