Stefan Reinauer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > * Ronald G Minnich <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [020703 15:58]: > > Eric, for your PCI scheme, do you end up with an entry for every single > > PCI device, or for classes of devices? I'm wondering how big linuxbios > > will get to be if we have the whole PCI database in there. > > > > I wonder how the commercial bioses handle this? > > special handling is only needed for very rare pluggable devices. > it rather occurs for onboard bridges and such, which are specifically > known when compiling.
Right. There are lots of bridge devices that need a little special tweaking. PCI-ISA bridges, northbridges etc. > > can linuxbios make everything slow and let linux handle it? > > Linux has a lot of fixups for devices anyways so this should not be a > problem. > I think keeping complexity out of LinuxBIOS in this case makes a lot of > sense. 1) If it is motherboard specific Linux should not touch it. 2) I'm not advocating doing things in LinuxBIOS that we aren't doing right now. Instead I'm advocating putting a driver model in front of it. This should reduce the number of hard codes and make LinuxBIOS more maintainable. The model is I know I have chips of types A, B, and C on the motherboard so compile those in. With things like 4G of ram I need to allocate all of the resources before Linux starts up so I can be certain all pci resources will fit into the hole provided for them. Eric
