Access to PCI Expansion ROMs on PPC

[Jon Smirl]

On 11/25/07, Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh at kernel.crashing.org> wrote:
>
> On Sun, 2007-11-25 at 08:30 -0500, Jon Smirl wrote:
> >
> > > The two cards with x86 firmware return 0xFF for those two readb()
> > > instructions, while the X1900 with OF returns 0x00 for the readb().
> > >
> > > Could one of the more knowledgeable folk for PPC intricacies suggest
> > why
> > > those readb calls are returning the wrong data?
> >
> > I don't know PPC at this low of level but it may be a problem with non
> > word-aligned access to memory. I thought readb() was supposed to work
> > on all archs and alignment issues are handled inside readb(). Also,
> > the readw() may have an endian bug.
>
> Ugh ? Read be reads -bytes- ! Can you tell me how the hell can a byte
> access be non-aligned ?

readb() doesn't work on the dev board I'm currently working with
because the flash is wired in such a way that it only works for 16b
reads. Maybe calling that an alignment issue is the wrong term.

> > BenH, has source code for an x86 emulator that will run on PPC. That
> > will let you run the ROMs. The original plan was for the kernel to
> > generate a uevent that would have triggered the x86 emulator to run.
> >
> > Progress along that path was blocked by the X developers. The X server
> > contains code for enabling the PCI ROM and reading it from user space.
> > I wanted to move this code out of X and into the kernel.
> >
> > Because the path was blocked things like the PCI ROM API were never
> > throughly tested. It works most of the time but the occasional problem
> > is still turning up. Once we identify the PPC problem we can fix it in
> > the kernel.
>
> Nobody blocked anything, you are free to develop an emulator triggered
> by a uevent, nobody prevented you from doing so.

They blocked the X server changes, which rendered the kernel support
pointless. But that's all old news.

> Now, regarding that user problem, this it totally unrelated as it's a
> "mac" card.
>
> It's possible that it's one of these radeons that disable ROM access via
> a register in which case a quirk is needed to re-enable it.

-- 
Jon Smirl
jonsmirl at gmail.com