[U-Boot] Bare x86 support is merged to u-boot-x86

[Bin Meng]

Hi Simon,

On Wed, Nov 26, 2014 at 5:51 AM, Simon Glass <sjg at chromium.org> wrote:
> Hi Bin (and others interested in U-Boot on x86),
>
> I've applied the remaining x86 patches to u-boot-x86. It runs on
> chromebook_link (Pixel) with support for most hardware relevant to a
> boot loader: SDRAM, SPI, PCI, USB (and USB Ethernet), SATA (internal
> 32GB SSD), SD card, LCD, UART, keyboard, EC.
>
> Bin this should be a good base for you to send patches for your Atom
> platform and I have no major work pending now so should not get in
> your way.
>

This is great! Thanks for applying your patch series into the mainline
so quickly. I will start working on my patches soon.

> Instructions on how to build and run are here:
>
> http://www.denx.de/wiki/U-Boot/X86
>
> For this platform 4 binary blobs are needed. This is an unavoidable
> feature of the platform at present. The blobs cover flash descriptor,
> SDRAM init, video init and Management Engine. Instructions on how to
> get these are on the same page.
>
> Here is a list of some missing features:
>
> - README.x86 in the source (mostly the content from the Wiki page
> would be a good start)
> - MTRR support (for performance)
> - Audio
> - Chrome OS verified boot (only a rough rebase has been done, I'm not
> sure how to track mainline anyway)
> - SMI and ACPI support, to provide platform info and facilities to Linux
>

One question related to ACPI, do we need support pre-ACPI protocols
for handling over resource allocations and interrupt vector assignment
information to the OS? I mean the PIRQ table and MP table. These specs
are really old nowadays, and even commercial BIOS does not always get
those tables correct, but as far as I can see, ACPI tables are more
reliable. I think this is largely because they validate ACPI support
with Windows and Linux which always use ACPI.

Regards,
Bin