[coreboot] [RFC] GSoC proposal: Native graphics init for AMD/ATI graphics hardware

Stefan Reinauer stefan.reinauer at coreboot.org
Wed Mar 20 19:36:58 CET 2013


* Patrick Georgi <patrick at georgi-clan.de> [130320 11:52]:
> Am 20.03.2013 11:28, schrieb Paul Menzel:
> > 1. Is that even possible for AMD/ATI hardware in their current design
> > with ATOM BIOS and firmware?
> For simply initializing the chip, tracing what the driver does works
> just as well as on Intel chips.
> 
> The main issue is that OS drivers have an expectation to find those
> tables (closed source drivers less so than open source, it seems), so
> you'd need to provide them in one form or another.
> 
> Semi-automatically building new (and independent) ATOMBIOS tables from
> trace data is probably a hard problem.

As far as I remember, ATOM BIOS is some sort of virtual machine that
interprets a list of memory and IO instructions to initialize the
hardware. Which is actually very similar to what Ron does now on the
Sandybridge/Ivybridge hardware.

Maybe it's feasible to find and interpret the ATOM BIOS tables in the
vga oprom of those machines as a first step instead of jumping into the
blob?

A next step might be to port those tables to work with Ron's state
machine? And/or SeaBIOS' VGA oprom sub project.

Related information:
http://olivermcfadden.livejournal.com/11669.html
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NjA2NA


Regards,
 Stefan





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