Hi Andy,
On 25 November 2014 at 15:08, Andy Pont andy.pont@sdcsystems.com wrote:
Hi Simon (and Bin),
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.
Thanks for all of your efforts on getting some x86 support into U-Boot. Hopefully in the new year when project work is back under control I will have some time to get involved with this - I have almost 20 years experience porting commercial BIOS and UEFI solutions for x86 hardware and possibly a bunch of Atom C2750 hardware arriving in January.
Sounds great! I do wonder whether U-Boot could support some UEFI protocols.
Other than the list of missing features, what are your long term goals/ambitions/desires with x86 support in U-Boot? From what I can see on the Coreboot mailing list it isn't the friendliest of people and doesn't seem to know how to deal with the binary blobs that both Intel and AMD seem to mandate for their chipsets now.
It would be nice to make x86 a first-class U-Boot citizen, meaning that it has a reasonable set of features as required by a reasonable set of modern boards. That means supporting a few more classes of chipsets. Then we get all the features that U-Boot has, hopefully without to much of the BIOS-era baggage that x86 often brings along (U-Boot is pretty simple to understand). I'm pretty happy that the current port fits well into the U-Boot philosophy.
The binary blobs are certainly a problem, but we deal with them in other cases also - e.g. some ARM SoCs require a signed pre-boot image. Something to discuss I suppose.
Regards, Simon