Porting Linuxbios to Via P4m266A

Kevin O'Connor kevin at koconnor.net
Mon Feb 28 13:21:01 CET 2005


On Thu, Feb 24, 2005 at 08:02:29AM -0700, Ronald G. Minnich wrote:
> On Thu, 24 Feb 2005 sherlock at vsnl.com wrote:
> > Any pointers? my mail archive does not throw up aything.
> 
> it's complex. You have to compile the emulator with romcc, and then romcc 
> uses the standard bios as the target. It would be a heroic hack!
> 
> But, at the end, we would have the ability to run the fuctory BIOS from 
> power-on under emulation and work out all the chip secrets.

I think a two computer solution might be easier.  If one can get early
serial on the target machine, then a small romcc program could read
commands from the serial port, execute them, and transmit back the
results.  (I think I even saw an email from someone that did this in pure
assembler.)

Then, a specially modified emulator could run the original bios on a second
machine, forwarding memory reads/writes and io reads/writes through the
serial port to the target machine.

Thoughts?
-Kevin



More information about the coreboot mailing list