[coreboot] [PATCH] (somewhat) clean up intel southbridge drivers

[Joseph Smith]

On 02/20/2010 05:32 PM, Stefan Reinauer wrote:
> Hi there,
>
> the intel southbridge drivers are a mess.
>
> I suggest to do the following:
>
> cd coreboot/src/southbridge
> svn mv i82801ca i82801cx
> svn mv i82801dbm i82801dx
> svn mv i82801er i82801ex
> svn copy i82801xx i82801bx
> svn mv i82801xx i82801ax
>
> (plus, fixing up the filenames in these directories and the romstage.c
> and Kconfig files of the mainboards using those drivers)
>
> And then cleaning up all the code undermining the driver infrastructure
> in the 82801xx driver, so we can drop the spaghetti code that checks for
> PCI devices in actual init functions all over the place.
>
> Why? Because it is simply unmaintainable. The unified driver is not
> unified, it's rather incomplete enough so nobody noticed. The ICH4 and
> ICH4M are very similar. So are the ICH5 and ICH5M and ICH5R. It's a good
> idea to have a "unified" driver per chipset generation. But not across
> several generations of chipsets.
>
> In order to fix graphics output for the i830/ich4 combination I'd like
> to add an SMM handler and MBI interface to the ICH4 specific version of
> the code. But there's not much gain in trying to check ICH0 datasheets
> to see if what was never intended to be done on that chipset is
> possible. And if I go and add guards for PCI IDs in the code, I'll
> rather clean up the code to get it do the PCI ID matching that coreboot
> intended for such cases instead of spaghettiing them into runtime checks.
>
> I don't think that a shared driver like this is worth the ugliness that
> comes with it. It's fair to say that if you don't know if you have an
> ICH0 or ICH4, you can't do a coreboot port, because you will fail in so
> many other places before and after that.
>
> So folks, if you agree that we should clean up coreboot and make it
> easier for people, send me an Acked-by: for the above idea.
>
> Signed-off-by: Stefan Reinauer <stepan at coresystems.de>
>
You have my
Acked-by: Joseph Smith <joe at settoplinux.org>

But you may want to hear from others first.

-- 
Thanks,
Joseph Smith
Set-Top-Linux
www.settoplinux.org