[LinuxBIOS] 440bx stuff

Stefan Reinauer stepan at coresystems.de
Tue Nov 7 15:10:38 CET 2006


* Johan Rydberg <jrydberg at gnu.org> [061107 14:28]:
> I would say that this is a shame.  We really need a top-notch full
> system simulator.  But doing complete and correct simulation of
> chipsets is hard, error prone and quite boring.  Therefor emulators
> like QEMU take the short path, and put in a "phony" BIOS and more or
> less do not implement a northbridge at all.
 
I know SimNow can theoretically do it, and it can be enhanced by Plugins
for CPU, northbridge, southbridge, other bridges, other pci devices

But I doubt AMD is going to add Intel CPU plugins to it ;-)

Can Simics to that stuff? 

> What we need is a full-system simulator with the following
> characteristics;
> 
>  * correct,
>  * deterministic,
>  * visible device state,
>  * visible cpu state,
>  * scriptable,
>  * and pluggable (for profiling and coverage tools)
> 
> Note that I have not put "fast" on the list.  I think that is
> secondary for our use case.  

For this simulator to be done, a whole lot of understanding of the
hardware components is required, maybe including their errata. Adding
support for a new component for such a simulator _might_ be more work
than writing a bios for the same chipset.

But no doubt this would be great to have.

Stefan


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