[coreboot] [announce] coreboot for the 21st century

[Andrew Wu]

2014-03-27 22:26 GMT+08:00 Patrick Georgi <patrick at georgi-clan.de>:
> The plan is to enable us to write romstage code with the expectation that at
> least some RAM (through CAR) is available. (while bootblock is expected to
> work without RAM of any kind, and ramstage has the full RAM available)
> If someone wants to use romcc for romstage, that means working without other
> object files (since romcc never emits a "call" instruction, except when
> hand-assembled). Thus reusing other .c files in romcc means "#include *.c"
> as it always did.
> Proposal: If someone goes that route, and things break due to the .c files
> of the coreboot core being too complex for romcc to handle, they get to keep
> the pieces - it's unsupported.
> I expect special cases like Vortex (or old chipsets like Via C3, if someone
> has the interest and time to do the port) to have a simple enough RAM
> initialization that they can be implemented as standalone C code. That's
> still _much_ more comfortable than writing assembly, and it'll work: it has
> one entry-point (like CAR code), one exit point (calling into common C code
> to load the next stage), and everything inbetween is compiled by romcc to
> work without RAM.
> Should we find out that all the hundred ancient ram inits we get contributed
> reimplement the same things over and over, we can still consider moving
> those parts to src/lib/romcc, neatly separated from regular romstage code.

I agree your idea. It should be not difficult for Vortex86EX. :)


Andrew