work with minimal adjustments on other x86 boards since coreboot deals with
most of the low-level details.
-U-Boot also supports booting directly from x86 reset vector without coreboot,
-aka raw support or bare support. Currently Link, QEMU x86 targets and all
-Intel boards support running U-Boot 'bare metal'.
+U-Boot also supports booting directly from x86 reset vector, without coreboot.
+In this case, known as bare mode, from the fact that it runs on the
+'bare metal', U-Boot acts like a BIOS replacement. Currently Link, QEMU x86
+targets and all Intel boards support running U-Boot 'bare metal'.
As for loading an OS, U-Boot supports directly booting a 32-bit or 64-bit
Linux kernel as part of a FIT image. It also supports a compressed zImage.
-Build Instructions
-------------------
+Build Instructions for U-Boot as coreboot payload
+-------------------------------------------------
Building U-Boot as a coreboot payload is just like building U-Boot for targets
on other architectures, like below:
to point to a new board. You can also change the Cache-As-RAM (CAR) related
settings here if the default values do not fit your new board.
+Build Instructions for U-Boot as BIOS replacement (bare mode)
+-------------------------------------------------------------
Building a ROM version of U-Boot (hereafter referred to as u-boot.rom) is a
little bit tricky, as generally it requires several binary blobs which are not
shipped in the U-Boot source tree. Due to this reason, the u-boot.rom build is
This tells the Makefile to build u-boot.rom as a target.
-Link-specific instructions:
+---
+
+Chromebook Link specific instructions for bare mode:
First, you need the following binary blobs:
$ make chromebook_link_defconfig
$ make all
-Intel Crown Bay specific instructions:
+---
+
+Intel Crown Bay specific instructions for bare mode:
U-Boot support of Intel Crown Bay board [4] relies on a binary blob called
Firmware Support Package [5] to perform all the necessary initialization steps
$ make crownbay_defconfig
$ make all
-Intel Minnowboard Max instructions:
+---
+
+Intel Minnowboard Max instructions for bare mode:
This uses as FSP as with Crown Bay, except it is for the Atom E3800 series.
Download this and get the .fd file (BAYTRAIL_FSP_GOLD_003_16-SEP-2014.fd at
Overall ROM image size is controlled by CONFIG_ROM_SIZE.
+---
-Intel Galileo instructions:
+Intel Galileo instructions for bare mode:
Only one binary blob is needed for Remote Management Unit (RMU) within Intel
Quark SoC. Not like FSP, U-Boot does not call into the binary. The binary is
# in the coreboot root directory
$ ./build/util/cbfstool/cbfstool build/coreboot.rom add-flat-binary \
- -f u-boot-dtb.bin -n fallback/payload -c lzma -l 0x1110000 -e 0x1110015
+ -f u-boot-dtb.bin -n fallback/payload -c lzma -l 0x1110000 -e 0x1110000
-Make sure 0x1110000 matches CONFIG_SYS_TEXT_BASE and 0x1110015 matches the
-symbol address of _start (in arch/x86/cpu/start.S).
+Make sure 0x1110000 matches CONFIG_SYS_TEXT_BASE, which is the symbol address
+of _x86boot_start (in arch/x86/cpu/start.S).
If you want to use ELF as the coreboot payload, change U-Boot configuration to
use CONFIG_OF_EMBED instead of CONFIG_OF_SEPARATE.
the video information correctly (it always says the resolution is 0x0). This
works correctly for link though.
-Test with QEMU
---------------
+Test with QEMU for bare mode
+----------------------------
QEMU is a fancy emulator that can enable us to test U-Boot without access to
a real x86 board. Please make sure your QEMU version is 2.3.0 or above test
U-Boot. To launch QEMU with u-boot.rom, call QEMU as follows:
For the microcode you can create a suitable device tree file using the
microcode tool:
- ./tools/microcode-tool -d microcode.dat create <model>
+ ./tools/microcode-tool -d microcode.dat -m <model> create
or if you only have header files and not the full Intel microcode.dat database:
./tools/microcode-tool -H BAY_TRAIL_FSP_KIT/Microcode/M0130673322.h \
-H BAY_TRAIL_FSP_KIT/Microcode/M0130679901.h \
- create all
+ -m all create
These are written to arch/x86/dts/microcode/ by default.
If not, you can try to get serial working as early as possible. The early
debug serial port may be useful here. See setup_early_uart() for an example.
+During the U-Boot porting, one of the important steps is to write correct PIRQ
+routing information in the board device tree. Without it, device drivers in the
+Linux kernel won't function correctly due to interrupt is not working. Please
+refer to U-Boot doc [14] for the device tree bindings of Intel interrupt router.
+Here we have more details on the intel,pirq-routing property below.
+
+ intel,pirq-routing = <
+ PCI_BDF(0, 2, 0) INTA PIRQA
+ ...
+ >;
+
+As you see each entry has 3 cells. For the first one, we need describe all pci
+devices mounted on the board. For SoC devices, normally there is a chapter on
+the chipset datasheet which lists all the available PCI devices. For example on
+Bay Trail, this is chapter 4.3 (PCI configuration space). For the second one, we
+can get the interrupt pin either from datasheet or hardware via U-Boot shell.
+The reliable source is the hardware as sometimes chipset datasheet is not 100%
+up-to-date. Type 'pci header' plus the device's pci bus/device/function number
+from U-Boot shell below.
+
+ => pci header 0.1e.1
+ vendor ID = 0x8086
+ device ID = 0x0f08
+ ...
+ interrupt line = 0x09
+ interrupt pin = 0x04
+ ...
+
+It shows this PCI device is using INTD pin as it reports 4 in the interrupt pin
+register. Repeat this until you get interrupt pins for all the devices. The last
+cell is the PIRQ line which a particular interrupt pin is mapped to. On Intel
+chipset, the power-up default mapping is INTA/B/C/D maps to PIRQA/B/C/D. This
+can be changed by registers in LPC bridge. So far Intel FSP does not touch those
+registers so we can write down the PIRQ according to the default mapping rule.
+
+Once we get the PIRQ routing information in the device tree, the interrupt
+allocation and assignment will be done by U-Boot automatically. Now you can
+enable CONFIG_GENERATE_PIRQ_TABLE for testing Linux kernel using i8259 PIC and
+CONFIG_GENERATE_MP_TABLE for testing Linux kernel using local APIC and I/O APIC.
+
+This script might be useful. If you feed it the output of 'pci long' from
+U-Boot then it will generate a device tree fragment with the interrupt
+configuration for each device (note it needs gawk 4.0.0):
+
+ $ cat console_output |awk '/PCI/ {device=$4} /interrupt line/ {line=$4} \
+ /interrupt pin/ {pin = $4; if (pin != "0x00" && pin != "0xff") \
+ {patsplit(device, bdf, "[0-9a-f]+"); \
+ printf "PCI_BDF(%d, %d, %d) INT%c PIRQ%c\n", strtonum("0x" bdf[1]), \
+ strtonum("0x" bdf[2]), bdf[3], strtonum(pin) + 64, 64 + strtonum(pin)}}'
+
+Example output:
+ PCI_BDF(0, 2, 0) INTA PIRQA
+ PCI_BDF(0, 3, 0) INTA PIRQA
+...
+
TODO List
---------
- Audio
[11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table
[12] http://events.linuxfoundation.org/sites/events/files/slides/chromeos_and_diy_vboot_0.pdf
[13] http://events.linuxfoundation.org/sites/events/files/slides/elce-2014.pdf
+[14] doc/device-tree-bindings/misc/intel,irq-router.txt