[coreboot] SeaBIOS and USB UHCI keyboard support

Mansoor mansoor at iwavesystems.com
Wed Sep 30 09:01:18 CEST 2009


Its really a great news!!!. I will test this on my hardware (Intel Atom
(Silverthorne) & SCH US15W (Poulsbo) chipset)

A dumb question here... 
Why SeaBIOS have constrains? 
Can't we elaborate SeaBIOS as a driver part of coreboot? I mean a legacy
BIOS interrupts part(with constrains) + a driver section (includes support
for various drivers like USB keyboard USB mouse USB CDROM Hard disk etc)
without any constrains so that we can make use of current implementations
from Linux or other open source

Do you have any plan to support USB CD-ROM ?




-----Original Message-----

From: coreboot-bounces at coreboot.org [mailto:coreboot-bounces at coreboot.org]
On Behalf Of Kevin O'Connor
Sent: Wednesday, September 30, 2009 6:24 AM
To: Stefan Reinauer
Cc: coreboot
Subject: Re: [coreboot] SeaBIOS and USB UHCI keyboard support

Hi Stefan,

On Tue, Sep 29, 2009 at 04:47:04PM +0200, Stefan Reinauer wrote:
> Kevin O'Connor wrote:
> > The latest SeaBIOS git has preliminary support for USB keyboards.
> > I've tested this on qemu and on my epia-cn.
> 
> Would it not make sense to pack USB keyboard functionality into our GSoC
> project instead, and use one common USB stack for all our projects?
> Especially since this renders usbrom completely unusable; no two USB
> stacks can operate the hw reliably at the same time.
> 
> I'm a bit surprised by such action.

I'm sorry you were surprised.  I sent a note last month that I was
going to look at this.  I am truly sorry for the surprise and for any
disappointment.

SeaBIOS needs USB support in order to be usable on many platforms.  I
want SeaBIOS to be a "turn key" solution - that is, I want a vendor to
be able to boot up coreboot+seabios and say, "hey, this 'just works'".

I would prefer to pull in an external solution than implement a new
one.  Unfortunately, there isn't an external solution that works
today.

I looked closely at the libpayload code; I felt it would not work well
in the constrained environment that SeaBIOS runs in.  I believe
libpayload could be extended to support that constrained environment,
but I worry that would be an unnecessary burden on the other users of
libpayload (which aren't so constrained).


The support in SeaBIOS is currently 1029 lines of code - it is a
direct, no nonsense, just make it work implementation.

>Are you planning to add USB MSC
> support as well? Should we stop the OHCI efforts too and wait for your
> approach on that?

If someone steps forward with a solution that "just works", then I
will happily defer to that person.  Otherwise, I will continue to add
new features as I get time.

The next thing I am planning to look at is basic ohci keyboard
support, and then fleshing out the current keyboard support (eg,
auto-repeat, keyboard leds).

-Kevin

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