Hi Simon,
On Fri, Nov 20, 2015 at 11:09 AM, Simon Glass sjg@chromium.org wrote:
Hi,
I'm wondering what might come next for U-Boot x86 support.
The PCI conversion to driver model is coming along nicely. The ACPI support is only partially there but it is a good start.
What else? More platforms? Other features? Better support for existing platforms?
Two biggest feature gaps so far are complete ACPI support, and SMM support. ACPI is pretty much a must-have if we want power management feature in the OS. For SMM, I am not convinced that we have to do that in U-Boot, for example those BIOS guys invented USB legacy support (I/O port emulation of PS/2 keyboard) via SMM but today we have native USB support and we should not do such with SMM in U-Boot. One corner case is that some ACPI AML codes on some commercial BIOS trap the ACPI calls into SMM where SMM is a must-have. Unfortunately such limitations exist as there are still lots of unpublished chipset docs from various vendors who want to protect their IP (so-called).
ACPI support seems to be a must if we want to support booting Windows, also we may need help from SeaBIOS (chain-loaded from U-Boot).
For other features, what I can think of now are: - New platform support which relies on FSP. With FSP it is quite easy to add a new platform support for Intel processors. - FSP spec 1.1 support, however Intel has not released any FSP package based on FSP spec 1.1. I believe their next gen Atom/Core processors' FSP will support FSP 1.1 (like Braswell, Skylake) - TPM support, and Intel TXT/TXE - xHCI support on Intel chipset (looks the U-Boot xHCI driver is not working for Intel) - Audio support (maybe just providing audio codec's verb table in U-Boot)
Regards, Bin