[coreboot] ADLO for buildrom

[Myles Watson]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Stefan Reinauer [mailto:stepan at coresystems.de]
> Sent: Thursday, May 01, 2008 9:43 AM
> To: Myles Watson
> Cc: 'Jordan Crouse'; 'Coreboot'
> Subject: Re: [coreboot] ADLO for buildrom
> 
> Myles Watson wrote:
> > It's not soon enough for me.  It works now in QEMU, even though there is
> a
> > lot to be improved.  I'd like to put it into buildrom so that it is easy
> to
> > hack on.
> >
> "It"?
> 
> ADLO has been in our CVS/SVN repo since 2002. It should not be hard to
> hack on it...

The first thing I would do is remove all of the BIOS code since it's old and
relies on the old toolchain.  I thought it would be easier to add a couple
of small files to payloads/ then to get approval to blow away the code in
utils/ even though it is unused and outdated.

I never know what's going to be an easy/hard sell.

> >
> >> Does legacybios from Kevin O'Connor boot Vista?
> >>
> >
> > It probably does in QEMU, but not the 64-bit version.  The last I heard
> that
> > was the status of the Bochs BIOS.
> When I booted vista, i could interestingly only boot the 64bit version
> in qemu but even that needed a bunch of patches.

That's great that it boots 64-bit Vista, patches and all!  

> I suggest we wait until legacybios becomes the standard bios of qemu
> before we try to replace a well tested implementation with it.

The Bochs BIOS project is having a hard time finding anyone to review their
patches because of the tool chain, but there is little impetus for them to
switch to Kevin's port.  We could be that impetus.  Very few people have
been using ADLO from Coreboot.  When I fixed the delays and the ATA handling
so that it worked in hardware, the response was "get it patched upstream."
I've done that, but no one has cared enough to pull down the new version
into our tree.

I think the only part that needs to live in our tree is the wrapper that
passes information from Coreboot to the Bochs BIOS (however that's done.)
We win by using a payload that is not special purpose just for us.

Thanks,
Myles