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

[Simon Glass]

Hi Bin,

On 26 November 2014 at 18:44, Bin Meng <bmeng.cn at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

I vote no. ACPI should be enough.

Regards,
Simon