[OLPC-devel] Re: OLPC/LinuxBIOS: PCI configuration or not?

[Marcelo Tosatti]

On Fri, May 12, 2006 at 03:40:11PM -0500, Goodrich,Steven wrote:
> Marcello,
>  
> The Geode processor (and the CS5536 southbridge) doesn't have hardware
> PCI registers for all the devices in the CPU (and SB). Instead, PCI
> registers for most of the devices are implemented via SMM.
>  
> The question, then, is around the need for PCI headers.  Since this is a
> closed system, PCI configuraiton is (arguably) unnecessary.  Should we
> keep the PCI headers as implemented in our SMM handler, or should we
> expect to use a PCI-less configuration?
>  
> Naturally, this affects both LinuxBIOS and the Linux OS... 

Steven,

For the sake of driver compatibility I would suggest that PCI emulation
is kept for now - the sound and framebuffer drivers use the PCI
interface.

Dropping PCI support from the kernel is certainly good from a memory
footprint point of view, we might want to do that later during the game.