Re: [NILO-discuss] Zen and the art of running in real mode

[Michael B. <mb...@fe...>]

On Tue, 8 Mar 2005, Marty Connor wrote:
> >> Drivers we can fix.  Older ones are probably simpler anyway, and 
> >> newer ones probably use inX/outX already.
> > Not all drivers *can* be modified to use in/out (i.e. portio) as 
> > opposed to read/write (i.e. MMIO.)  It's a function of the hardware.
> Drat.  Hopefully these represent old, rarer, and hopefully less-used 
> cards.

Sadly not.  Dedicated I/O space is a legacy x86 feature; in order to work 
in non-x86 machines, hardware needs to support memory-mapped I/O.  Since 
x86 can also use memory-mapped I/O (unless, of course, you're stuck in 
real-mode), there's no real benefit to supporting it.  Hence, newer cards 
are likely to be MMIO-only.

> In order to move things along, I've asked Michael to import code into
> the nilo tree whenever he is ready, setting a tag in the Etherboot tree.

Code is imported.  There's a script, ebsync.pl, that can be used at any 
time to sync across current Etherboot CVS to the EB_CVS branch of NILO 
CVS.  This does *not* automatically merge changes from the EB_CVS branch 
into the NILO HEAD branch; that part must currently be done manually using 
something along the lines of

   cvs update -jEB_LAST_SYNC -jEB_CVS

then resolving all the conflicts, checking in the changes and reassigning 
the tag EB_LAST_SYNC with

   cvs tag -r EB_CVS EB_LAST_SYNC

I'll probably automate this process the first time I need to use it.

Michael