[coreboot] GSoC project(SCSI boot)__status report

[Joseph Smith]

On Tue, 17 Jun 2008 22:58:00 -0400, Kevin O'Connor <kevin at koconnor.net>
wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 09:25:59PM -0400, Joseph Smith wrote:
>> On Wed, 18 Jun 2008 01:04:49 +0200, Stefan Reinauer
> <stepan at coresystems.de>
>> wrote:
>> > To make this really good, we'd need to heavily extend that intXX
>> > callback code in coreboot. Which means it has to grow and grow and it
>> > will eventually become a reduced version of LegacyBIOS. That is bad.
> If
>> > we know LegacyBIOS does a pretty good job and it is reasonably small
>> > (even qemu's current bios.bin is under 30k with , I would really
> prefer
>> > using it for that task instead of yet another half-baked solution.
>> >
>> I think we all came to an agreement that the only "real" way to do this
> is
>> integrate legacybios (or parts) into coreboot (as an option of course).
> 
> I recommend caution here.
> 
> I think it is important that LegacyBIOS support kvm, qemu, and bochs.
> Having the code support those environments will help increase the
> overall user base, which will help ensure the core code supports many
> different OSes and is thoroughly tested.  So, I don't think we want to
> make LegacyBIOS coreboot specific.
> 
> I also don't think it would be a good idea to fork the code or copy
> large parts of it into multiple repositories.
> 
> So, I'm all for aligning coreboot and LegacyBIOS - it is after all the
> reason I started LegacyBIOS - but I think we need to come up with a
> boundary between the two.  In my opinion, coreboot should (optionally)
> call out to LegacyBIOS and the two should work towards the same goal.
> But I don't think they should be tightly integrated at the source code
> level.
> 
Hmm. Then how are we going to go about this? What do you suggest Kevin?
Could we set up coreboot to call LegacyBIOS at a certain point, execute it,
and then jump back to coreboot? Kind of like vm86/x86emu does for VGA? If
so at what point in the coreboot process do we want this to happen?

-- 
Thanks,
Joseph Smith
Set-Top-Linux
www.settoplinux.org