[LinuxBIOS] AMD Geode LX VSA and VSMs

Stefan Reinauer stepan at coresystems.de
Thu May 3 18:47:04 CEST 2007


* Jordan Crouse <jordan.crouse at amd.com> [070503 17:39]:
> Thats what OFW does for OLPC - and its fraught with danger.  Case in 
> point?  A few days ago, the amount of video memory was doubled in OFW,
> to 16MB.  But since the PCI spoofing happens in the kernel, it didn't 
> get the message that the video memory changed, and the PCI BAR was still
> sized to 8MB, and X goes boom.

With VSA, is the PCI spoofing done in system management mode?

> This is intelligence (or insanity, depending on your point of view),
> that very much belongs in the firmware - the kernel shouldn't need to 
> know how any of this works.

I completely agree on that. While having component (drivers) and
architecture specific knowledge in the kernel definitely makes sense,
such board specific details do not belong in the kernel, or it will make
the kernel very hard to maintain.

The fact that drivers and scheduler and memory management are all part
of a big hunk in Linux is really nasty already. I believe Tannenbaum was
right with his words. Today even more than back when he was discussing
with Linus.

Stefan

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