SiS630 Software Watchdog Timer

[Eric W. Biederman]

"Ronald G. Minnich" <rminnich at lanl.gov> writes:

> On Mon, 17 Mar 2003, Spirit wrote:
> 
> > That shouldn't be a problem unless it takes 5 seconds to get to the
> > southbridge.c code. But of course, moving it to an earlier position is
> > a good idea.
> 
> It really takes 5 seconds? it did not used to. I liked having it in the 
> southbridge code for a simple reason: if you are in that code then things 
> are working well. If you are not in that kind at some point, you really 
> want that watchdog reset. It is a very simple self-test. 

This is something I want to look at.
I have seen the decompresser taking a full second on several different
machines and I find any discernible pause to be a problem.

Tentatively I have attributed this to a poorly setup cache somewhere.
But I have not had a chance to really investigate it.

As it stands right now I am in inch from moving the decompresser
from code that runs from ROM to code that runs from RAM, to see if
that fixes the performance issue.

When I load an etherboot image I have never detected a noticeable
slowdown.  Which is relevant because etherboot uses exactly the same
code.  With just minimal changes to cope with running the code in a
different environment.

Eric