Messages in this thread | | | Date | Fri, 26 Jun 2009 11:38:59 +0200 | From | Ingo Molnar <> | Subject | Re: [PATCH 3/9] x86/moorestown: add moorestown platform flags |
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* Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk> wrote:
> > Why dont we have some clean and robust PCI config space based > > enumeration instead of this boot ID based thing? > > That strikes me as a rather dumb question given that
It's an entirely legitimate question, given that many other current modern subarchitectures detect themselves based on PCI config space early accesses or (sometimes) BIOS data structures - and that both of those methods are better than using boot flags.
> - Embedded x86 like devices are going to regularly occur without > any PCI
This proposed Intel subarchitecture comes with PCI support, obviously.
> - You need to know the platform in order to know how to access any > PCI bus that may or may not hypothetically exist.
Uhm, not really.
Have a look at arch/x86/kernel/early-quirks.c. All you generally need to know is a PCI ID that sits on the root bus.
Early PCI ID checks are typical and robust way to identify 'weird' subarchitectures. Sometimes we do it via BIOS data structures. Only as a last option do we want to use boot loader mechanisms - it's the most inflexible one really.
Furtherore, Moorestown comes with SFI and there sure can be a BIOS table that describes the platform properly. We can read such tables very early during bootup, well before platform devices are set up.
Ingo
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