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| Meeting today, the majority of which was spent discussing an idea I had for loading large ROMs in crowded option ROM environments: have a small ROM stub that loads the rest of the ROM to an area not subject to the 128k option ROM limit. There are several ways of implementing this: | Meeting today, the majority of which was spent discussing an idea I had for loading large ROMs in crowded option ROM environments: have a small ROM stub that loads the rest of the ROM to an area not subject to the 128k option ROM limit. There are several ways of implementing this: | ||
| * My initial idea: program the PCI ROM BAR to map the full ROM to an area in high memory. This has some serious practical issues of the "where do you put it?" variety, because one would need to walk both the e820 memory map and the PCI bus to find an area not used by RAM or any other memory-mapped I/O device in the system. And there are some devices, such as the APICs, that don't show up in either. | * My initial idea: program the PCI ROM BAR to map the full ROM to an area in high memory. This has some serious practical issues of the "where do you put it?" variety, because one would need to walk both the e820 memory map and the PCI bus to find an area not used by RAM or any other memory-mapped I/O device in the system. And there are some devices, such as the APICs, that don't show up in either. | ||
| - | * On the other hand, it may be safe to do this by looking for a sufficiently large contiguous area in PCI memory BAR mappings, disabling those mappings while we access the ROM, and reenabling them later - bears trying, at least. | + | * On the other hand, it may be safe to do this by looking for a sufficiently PCI memory BAR mapping (e.g. video card), disabling that mapping while we access the ROM, and reenabling it later - bears trying, at least. |
| * Michael's idea: use the NVS subsystem to access the flash directly, scan for a gPXE image embedded within it, expose it via int13h, and boot it. The only practical issue here is the fact that most supported NICs don't have an NVS driver. The result may also be rather larger than accessing the PCI BARs, but tiny code that doesn't work is useless. | * Michael's idea: use the NVS subsystem to access the flash directly, scan for a gPXE image embedded within it, expose it via int13h, and boot it. The only practical issue here is the fact that most supported NICs don't have an NVS driver. The result may also be rather larger than accessing the PCI BARs, but tiny code that doesn't work is useless. | ||
| This will be an interesting project to hack on over the next week. :-) | This will be an interesting project to hack on over the next week. :-) | ||
