[LinuxBIOS] v2: rewrite AMD K* CAR code

[Jordan Crouse]

On 10/01/08 03:26 +0100, Carl-Daniel Hailfinger wrote:
> On 10.01.2008 03:00, Carl-Daniel Hailfinger wrote:
> > On 10.01.2008 01:45, Marc Jones wrote:
> >   
> >> Carl-Daniel Hailfinger wrote:
> >>     
> >>> On 08.01.2008 23:00, ron minnich wrote:
> >>>       
> >>>> Actually, if you all want to commit this, I can try it on the sis
> >>>> board this week.   
> >>>>         
> >>> Well, i'd like to commit, but I'll wait until you (or someone else) have
> >>> tested it.
> >>>       
> >> We checked this on K8 with DCACHE_RAM_SIZE=0x08000 and it works as
> >> expected.
> >>     
> >
> > Thanks, great!
> >
> > There's one issue with specific binutils versions, though. The following
> > sequence trips up a specific gas version with an error message: "Error:
> > too many positional arguments"
> >
> > I'd like to blacklist the specific binutils version causing this and
> > report the bug to the linux distributor.
> > Jordan, could you give us more details (exact binutils version, name of
> > distribution, are all updates applied)?
> >   
> 
> Or try this patch on top of my current patch:

That did the trick.  Thank you.

I do want to explain myself a little bit more.  I have a dedicated SimNow
box that we built out some time ago - it works well because it has lots
of processors and lots of memory, and nobody else uses it, so its perfect
as a SimNow solution (SimNow uses a lot of resources, as you might
imagine).

This box is running a ancient version of Gentoo (sometime in 2005, if I
am not mistaken).  It lives in the server room, and I haven't had the
need nor wherewithall to ask permission to go in there and install 
something more modern on it.  It just works, and thats good enough for
me. 

So it was to my surprise and delight when I discovered last year that
both buildrom and the k8 LinuxBIOS code would compile on the box with no 
problems - thats one less 'scp' I need to try out images.

Thats why I raised the alarm on this patch - its not so much that it *has*
to work on an ancient binutils version, its more that it worked _before_ the
patch, so unless Carl-Daniel intended to break support for ancient 
binutils, it should work _after_.  I would have been fine with giving the
old server the boot, but I thought if we could figure out a reasonable
workaround, it wouldn't hurt the project.

So my appreciation goes to Carl-Daniel for humoring me.

Jordan

-- 
Jordan Crouse
Systems Software Development Engineer 
Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.