Hammer Documentation is now Available at AMD's website

[Thomas J. Merritt]

|<><><><><> Original message from Eric W. Biederman  <><><><><>
|"Thomas J. Merritt" <tjm at codegen.com> writes:
|
|> |<><><><><> Original message from Eric W. Biederman  <><><><><>
|> |So far I have just skimmed the Documentation but it appears that
|> |AMD has now publicly published everything needed to do  Hammer
|> |LinuxBIOS port.
|> |
|> |No great surprise but it is nice to actually see it !
|> |
|> |Yeah!  The chaos with the Dual Athlons has finally paid off :)
|> 
|> It does appear that they have released all of the documentation 
|> necessary.  The learning curve is pretty steep though.  There are
|> a lot of registers to program to make a box sing.  We have been
|> able to bring SmartFirmware up on our AMD Solo box.  It has taken
|> about 5 months to get to the point that we can now boot NetBSD.
|> We're currently unable to boot Linux, but making progress on that front.
|
|Hmm.  I wonder if that is because of the open firmware chaos.

Open Firmware is pretty much out of the picture when the kernel takes 
over.  The primary problem is the wired assumptions in the legacy PC
chaos.

|So far I have not seen anything out of the ordinary in the way of
|a learning curve, and I just booted a linux kernel.

Keep in mind that our background is primarily PowerPC, Sparc, MIPS and ARM
processors and we've avoided x86 for the most part.  Learning the
Hammer side of things has been relatively easy, it has been more 
painful learning the legacy PC stuff that hangs out in the 8111
I/O Hub.

|> On the LinuxBIOS front we're planning to leverage our x86-64 experience
|> and provide commercial support for LinuxBIOS on AMD64 processors.  
|> With AMD's public release of the processor and chipset documentation we
|> should be releived of most of our NDA obligations, and this will now
|> become possible.  If anyone has hardware and is contemplating bring up
|> LinuxBIOS please let me know, since I don't want to duplicate effort if
|> we can avoid it.
|
|You have heard the talk about the freebios2 tree?
|
|Anyway Stefan Reinauer at SuSe and I are busily bringing it up.
|So far so good.  We are still in the stage where you hard code things,
|so you know you understand what registers need to be programmed,
|but everything has been straight forward so far.

As straight forward as a PC can I would say.  Given that you have
experience with prior AMD chipsets, the Hammer should look pretty 
familiar.  We've reviewed about 5000 pages of documentation in the
last several months and have most of it digested now.

TJ Merritt
tjm at codegen.com
1-925-462-4300 x115