[coreboot] libpayload TSC dependency
bifferos
bifferos at yahoo.co.uk
Wed Jan 13 14:14:52 CET 2010
I've hacked up a version of libpayload which doesn't depend on TSC
to get payloads running on my platform. It seems an unnecessary limitation of the library that it needs this, and also that it
checks CPU speed before the payload main() is called, meaning
you can't avoid it in your payload implementation without
recompilation of the lib.
I was just wondering if there would be any interest in a patch
to remove the dependency. It doesn't look too tricky, however
the ndelay function is hard to implement without TSC. Is this
function really needed? Which payloads are likely to suffer
if it's inaccurate? mdelay can be pretty accurate using the
PIT, udelay could perhaps be based on port 80 reads instead.
A scheme could be put in place to detect the TSC instruction
and fall back on alternative routines if it doesn't exist,
however as far as I can see this will involve creation of
an illegal instruction trap, setting up the IDT etc, which
might not be desirable. Removing TSC altogether may be
more appropriate, especially if the ndelay() routine isn't
really needed (my CPU is 150MHz).
Or we could just add a compilation option, however since
libpayload is a library I don't think that's ideal.
Any thoughts?
kind regards,
Biff.
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