I meant to send this to the list....
Marc
--
Marc Jones
Senior Software Engineer
(970) 226-9684 Office
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.amd.com/embeddedprocessors
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Stefan Reinauer wrote:
* Uwe Hermann <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [070503 12:01]:
The VSA binary source is LGPL and is available at:
http://dev.laptop.org/git.do?p=geode-vsa
Wow! Now I'm impressed. This is really great news!
This code has been out for quite a while, and it is really great stuff
although it will be hard for most LinuxBIOS developers to compile it
themselfes. It means that we can build binary images in the build system
and have them prepacked with the VSA code though, making deployment of
LinuxBIOS for the Geode LX platform very easy for the users.
OFW does not use the VSA at all anymore (as far as I know, please
correct me if I am wrong), since running the modules was slowing down
the boot process quite a bit (compared to the rest of the boot time at
least)
So one question is in my mind: Can we implement the setup done by VSA
as native LinuxBIOS code, and does it make sense? What are the draw
backs in such a scenario?
Stefan
I feel that the boot time issues were blown out of proportion and that
some other motivations were involved. For example have legacy BIOSs
running with VSA that POST in ~1-1.5 seconds. I think the LB+VSA could
be even faster. That is not to say VSA and LB can't be improved. I think
that one area to improve would be a couple of memory copies seem
unnecessary.
Note that it is not so much the setup that needs to be in VSA but the
runtime pci device virtualization (essentially a HAL).
With the VSA being open sourced I would hope that LB and the OS
community as a whole would embrace it instead of trying to work around it.
Marc
--
Marc Jones
Senior Software Engineer
(970) 226-9684 Office
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.amd.com/embeddedprocessors
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