[U-Boot] BIOS EMULATOR driver

Viktor Křivák viktor.krivak at gmail.com
Tue Mar 27 07:18:04 CEST 2012


Dear Wolfgang Denk and Marek Vasut,

2012/3/27 Marek Vasut <marek.vasut at gmail.com>:
> Dear Wolfgang Denk,
>
>> Dear Marek Vasut,
>>
>> In message <201203261531.18334.marex at denx.de> you wrote:
>> > So that means the board work without this bios emulator driver if the
>> > radeon driver is disabled? But we want to use the radeon driver, so we
>> > need the bios emulator stuff.
>>
>> Right.  If you don't need feature X and do not configure it, then you
>> don't need the driver that implements feature X, and building without
>> this driver works.  If you need feature X, then you must include it,
>> and it is usually no dead code then.
>>
>> And even if it was, the combination of -ffunction-sections /
>> -fdata-sections with --gc-sections should prevent any damages.
>
> Well, certainly ... but from what Viktor told me, there are slabs of dead code
> in this stuff.
>>
>> > I think the discussion quite drifted away from the original question,
>> > which was if the dead code in bios emulator stuff can be simply removed?
>> > ... and if it really is dead code.
>>
>> If you need the BIOS emulator to initialize the BIOS of a graphics
>> card it it probably not exactly "dead code".
>
> Certainly, though I'm not confident if all of the bios emulator stuff is used.

Yes that's the main problem. Lots of code i unused. Basically
everything except BootVideoCardBIOS, that is use in ATI video driver.
I've got two solution of this problem. First, mark all unused code by
some macro and compile it only conditionally or remove it. But I not
sure if someone use this death code for debug purposes.

>>
>> Best regards,
>>
>> Wolfgang Denk
>
> Best regards,
> Marek Vasut

Best regards,
Viktor Krivak


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