AMD Publishes New Chipset Documents

[AdrenalineJunky]

Hi lads, it would be good if ati linux users who have "old" graphic cards make a undersigned(I don't know if this is the correct word(google translate))

the word your looking for is petition.

and AMD has actually done alot for linux users of late - but between documentation of chipsets, drivers, open/closed source driver developement, etc, dropping the support for older graphics hadware was something they felt would help them give the best support to the largest amount of people.

that said, go for it - i certianly think bringing kernel/xorg updates to legacy drivers would be nice.

[cutterjohn]

I wonder if Coreboot are working on adding GUID Partition Table support?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table

As I found out lately, harddisks can not exceed 2TiB with the classic MBR. GUID is needed.

Or does these Southbridges support GUID perhaps?

IIRC that is a function of the BIOS, as it is the BIOS that is first started once the machine is turned on and is responsible for initial booting of the OS as well as basic hardware config beyond the powerup defaults...

Even if the BIOS doesn't support it I imagine that a bootloader might be able to work around the limitation...

AFAIK the only system that uses GUID ATM is OSX, and they use EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface from Intel, which they used as a replacement for OpenFirmware when they switched from powerpc. Either one of those are much nicer to work than traditional PC BIOSes as they are much mroe malleable and useful at boot-time...) [EDIT] Oh, yes, either of those replace the traditional BIOS, so machines with those do NOT have what most here would consider a BIOS although they provide much the same function in addition to MANY other things and are, well, extensible by design... [/EDIT]

[Kano]

Well it has a "protective" mbr, so in theory you could put a bootloader in the first bytes too...

[hargut]

IIRC that is a function of the BIOS, as it is the BIOS that is first started once the machine is turned on and is responsible for initial booting of the OS as well as basic hardware config beyond the powerup defaults...

Even if the BIOS doesn't support it I imagine that a bootloader might be able to work around the limitation...

It seems that you misunderstand something about coreboot + payloads.
Coreboot itself does "just" the job the hardware initialisation.
The payload is the part of software which is called by coreboot when the hardware is "ready to go".

A "BIOS" image with coreboot needs to contain one or more payloads, otherwise your machine won't boot anything.

http://www.coreboot.org/Anatomy_of_a_Failover_coreboot_v2_Image

I think that it is not a good idea to look at coreboot with the classical/typical bios approach. The way things are done in coreboot is quite different compared to a classical bios.

When grub2 does support the "GUID Partition Table" it will work with coreboot, as grub2 is a vaild payload.

You can also use for example a Linux vmlinux image as coreboot payload, and when you compile the kernel without harddisk drivers, you won't have access to a harddisk, but maybe you don't need it. There are hardly limitations for realising your ideas on "what should the boot progress do for my use/needs" on using coreboot.
If you like tetris and you don't want to do something else with your computer then check out the tint payload. (You won't need a harddisk in that case to play a tetris-style-game.)

http://www.coreboot.org/Payloads

When you say "a function of BIOS" it sounds for me like "what the bios isn't able to do nobody can do" - but as coreboot replaces the bios nearly everything what hardware can do could be done. And therefore good hardware documentation as AMD provides is really nessecary for getting coreboot running on a system.
Thanks AMD for providing hardware documentation for recent mainboard-chipsets! (Hopefully the frist AM3 boards can be supported within a few weeks/months.)

Over-/Underclocking is also possible with coreboot (and a few more things which can be realized with a processor - e.g. using the cache as ram (CAR) before initializing the ram (romcc)).
But right now there is no "fancy-bios-gui" for changeing settings for overclocking/underclocking. (changing coreboot code & recompiling would be needed)

Kind regards,
Harald

[chithanh]

In practice too, using syslinux gptmbr.bin which allows booting GPT disks from non-EFI systems. (Syslinux has no GPT chainloading support yet, though)

[highlandsun]

Well, those docs certainly made for interesting reading. It highlighted a fact that I hadn't realized until now - a lot of the BIOS comes from AMD as a blob, and you're just suppose to call into it or provide callbacks to it from your own main BIOS code. So in some respects the hardware initialization is still a black box...

[Louise]

But right now there is no "fancy-bios-gui" for changeing settings for overclocking/underclocking. (changing coreboot code & recompiling would be needed)

As for myself atleast the only options I have ever used are:

* change boot order
* enable Cool'n'Quite
* enable QFAN (ASUS feature)
* change allocated IGP memory
* PXE
* date and time

Are this kind of features something that the developers have planned?

And how do they feel about all the other options modern BIOSes have?

[Kano]

@chithanh

Did you ever look at the doc/gpt.txt? Usually somebody would like to use GPT when a hd or raid is bigger than 2 TB. But syslinux is not able to boot from a partition > 2 TB, then you can use a standard mbr too as you gain nothing.

[hargut]

As for myself atleast the only options I have ever used are:

* change boot order
* enable Cool'n'Quite
* enable QFAN (ASUS feature)
* change allocated IGP memory
* PXE
* date and time

Are this kind of features something that the developers have planned?

And how do they feel about all the other options modern BIOSes have?

* change boot order
use grub2/filo/or another bootloader as payload and you can change the boot order
* enable Cool'n'Quiet
Is supported, but needs ACPI support in your target motherboard.
* enable QFAN (ASUS feature)
I've no idea about what QFAN is, but using fancontrol from lm-sensors package should do the same job as I imagine.
* PXE
Use an etherboot/gpxe Payload.
* date and time
There are no setting fields for that, but hwclock --systohc does the job.

So in fact, all the stuff you'd need is supported.
But maybe not directly via modifying the values with a "BIOS-UI".

Kind regards,
Harald

[chithanh]

syslinux is not able to boot from a partition > 2 TB, then you can use a standard mbr too as you gain nothing.

That is a limitation but it is IMO not so severe to have /boot restricted to the first 2 TB. With MBR you cannot use >2 TB at all.