Which BIOS will OLPC have ?

Does anybody know what sort of BIOS would the OLPC use? Some
proprietary BIOS 
or LinuxBIOS or something open-source.

I personally think LinuxBIOS is the best choice: It cant
boot fast and is 
quite lightweight.

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											Thanks.

											Yours truly,
											Sunny Sachanandani

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Sunny Sachanandani wrote:
> Does anybody know what sort of BIOS would the OLPC use?
Some proprietary BIOS 
> or LinuxBIOS or something open-source.

 http://wiki.laptop.org/index.php/Hardware_specification

LinuxBIOS.

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On Mon, Jun 05, 2006 at 04:34:07PM +0530, Sunny Sachanandani
wrote:
> I personally think LinuxBIOS is the best choice: It
cant boot fast and is 
> quite lightweight.

Chunks of the geode PC hardware are emulated by SMM/SMI
traps so you actually
need some quite funky and non-free BIOS firmware blocks.

Alan

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Yes, we'll be using LinuxBIOS.  And Alan is correct about
how the Geode
works.

Some parts of the emulation code are not owned by AMD; some
parts are.
I don't yet know if we will be needing to use the (non-AMD)
proprietary
parts or not.  

AMD has told us that they are willing to free up code that
they own.  I
think we'll bother with this if it turns out that we can
have a BIOS
completely free of any closed code (building these modules
takes an
obsolete Windows tools no longer commercially easily
available, one of
the classics of why open source and free software is
better...).  At
which point it would make sense to do so, in my mind.  

The conversation I had with Dave Wahl on this topic was
several months
ago; I don't remember exactly which parts of the emulation
code were AMD
owned, and which were not.  My memory is that the VESA
emulation is not
owned by AMD; we don't plan to use it once we're using
fbdev.
                                      Regards,
                                             - Jim


On Mon, 2006-06-05 at 08:51 -0400, Alan Cox wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 05, 2006 at 04:34:07PM +0530, Sunny
Sachanandani wrote:
> > I personally think LinuxBIOS is the best choice:
It cant boot fast and is 
> > quite lightweight.
> 
> Chunks of the geode PC hardware are emulated by SMM/SMI
traps so you actually
> need some quite funky and non-free BIOS firmware
blocks.
> 
> Alan
> 
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Alan Cox wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 05, 2006 at 04:34:07PM +0530, Sunny
Sachanandani wrote:
> 
>>I personally think LinuxBIOS is the best choice: It
cant boot fast and is 
>>quite lightweight.
> 
> 
> Chunks of the geode PC hardware are emulated by SMM/SMI
traps so you actually
> need some quite funky and non-free BIOS firmware
blocks.

actually, amd is releasing that source. Plus, we are really
limiting our 
use of it, and in the long run, would like to remove it
entirely.

Alan, I understand there is a tiny usb driver for mass
store, is there a 
pointer somewhere to this? the standard usb driver is too
big.

thanks

ron

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On Mon, Jun 05, 2006 at 10:14:12AM -0400, Jim Gettys wrote:
> Yes, we'll be using LinuxBIOS.  And Alan is correct
about how the Geode
> works.

I actually have all the docs and the firmware source for the
older Geode,
with the permission of Cyrix. While I can use this to help
debug Linux problems
(including it would appear those with Linux firmware ;))
I'm not permitted to
make the documents or the firmware source itself public.

> owned, and which were not.  My memory is that the VESA
emulation is not
> owned by AMD; we don't plan to use it once we're
using fbdev.

Xorg for the older chips at least in part uses the VESA
emulation (which 
encapsulates chunks of the video circuitry knowledge). That
area doesn't
look problematic as the OLPC has a fixed video arrangement
and also has its
own rather unusual video design.

Alan

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On Mon, Jun 05, 2006 at 08:42:30AM -0600, Ronald G Minnich
wrote:
> Alan, I understand there is a tiny usb driver for mass
store, is there a 
> pointer somewhere to this? the standard usb driver is
too big.

For the mass storage end of it you want drivers/block/ub.c.
That is a non-scsi
stack dependant mini-driver for USB storage. 

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On Mon, 2006-06-05 at 10:55 -0400, Alan Cox wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 05, 2006 at 10:14:12AM -0400, Jim Gettys
wrote:
> org for the older chips at least in part uses the VESA
emulation (which 
> encapsulates chunks of the video circuitry knowledge).
That area doesn't
> look problematic as the OLPC has a fixed video
arrangement and also has its
> own rather unusual video design.

Actually, Xorg is willing (potentially) to work with either
VESA or
fbdev, and we don't have the problem of an outboard video
BIOS to deal
with the way you do with some graphics cards, so we have no
need to use
VESA for X support.

We'll have to add DCON support to an fbdev driver.  This
will be a fun
piece of work.  

On the agenda: if the X server is idle for a while, we may
want to turn
over display to the DCON, and turn off the video output
(lower power
that way: the video output and memory accesses use power),
vary the
refresh rate depending on screen activity (again, lower
power when
running slowly), and, of course, make sure suspend and
resume is
blindingly fast.

And an fbdev driver that may work on GX2 recently went into
Linus'
tree .
Hopefully it will be a good starting point.  Anyone who
wants
to test that driver please do.  Ron tried a bit on Friday in
LinuxBIOS
under Linux as bootloader; the base register for graphics
may not be
getting initialized and he got garbage on the screen.  It is
likely the
Insyde BIOS already initializes the base register
(otherwise, we'd not
be seeing messages), so trying under Linux booted from
Insyde would
provide interesting data.
                                 Regards,
                                    - Jim

               
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On Mon, Jun 05, 2006 at 11:20:31AM -0400, Jim Gettys wrote:
> And an fbdev driver that may work on GX2 recently went
into Linus'
> tree . Hopefully
it will be a good starting point.  Anyone who wants

drivers/video/geode/gx1* is a driver for the emulation
firmware not for the
hardware. The "gx" driver is a minimal driver
for a specific configuration
that has hardcoded assumptions about video layout, memory
size and the like
that won't work with most devices.

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Don't tell me we know of something you don't ?

http://git.kernel.org/git/?p=linux/k
ernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=blob;h=89c34b15f5d4f748de
01fdb76755b169c75af92d;hb=e60a48f5ab35737118e19bc965c640900a
842f02;f=drivers/video/geode/gxfb_core.c

On Mon, 2006-06-05 at 11:46 -0400, Alan Cox wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 05, 2006 at 11:20:31AM -0400, Jim Gettys
wrote:
> > And an fbdev driver that may work on GX2 recently
went into Linus'
> > tree . Hopefully
it will be a good starting point.  Anyone who wants
> 
> drivers/video/geode/gx1* is a driver for the emulation
firmware not for the
> hardware. The "gx" driver is a minimal
driver for a specific configuration
> that has hardcoded assumptions about video layout,
memory size and the like
> that won't work with most devices.
> 
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