[coreboot] Fwd: Merging Qi with coreboot?

[Peter Stuge]

Sorry about the crossposting. Please let me know if you should be
excluded.


ron minnich wrote:
> This is an interesting writeup (see link). I think they think
> coreboot does lots of BIOS stuff.

Andy Green wrote:
> | wouldn't it make more sense to leverage the work begin done on
> | Coreboot for x86?
> 
> x86 and s3c device boot are very different, and we don't need to
> take care about a lot of PC-centric BIOS business.

Note that coreboot is not about being a BIOS, by design. The idea
with coreboot since day 1 was to get Linux running as soon as
possible and to let Linux handle as much as it could. This design
goal seems to be shared by coreboot and Qi.

coreboot does not implement BIOS services, coreboot only does
hardware initialization and then it hands over to another program,
called the payload, which never returns.

Linux can be used as payload, if you really do want a BIOS you can
use the SeaBIOS payload, there are several lightweight bootloaders
that can be payloads (FILO, GRUB 2, gPXE, 9load..) and simple
applications can be built into payloads using libpayload.

While coreboot worked mostly for x86 small and large in the past, it
has supported both alpha and power. In coreboot v3 we make an effort
to keep everything arch clean to make support also for non-x86 easy.

What steps does Qi need to take before it can hand over to Linux?


//Peter