and instead add platform, firmware and EFI stubs to the loader.
The net effect of this change is that besides a special console and
disk driver, the kernel has no knowledge of the simulator. This has
the following advantages:
o Simulator support is much harder to break,
o It's easier to make use of more feature complete simulators.
This would only need a change in the simulator specific loader,
o Running SMP kernels within the simulator. Note that ski at this
time does not simulate IPIs, so there's no way to start APs.
The platform, firmware and EFI stubs describe the following hardware:
o 4 CPU Itanium,
o 128 MB RAM within the 4GB address space,
o 64 MB RAM above the 4GB address space.
NOTE: The stubs in the skiloader describe a machine that should in
parts be defined by the simulator. Things like processor interrupt
block and AP wakeup vector cannot be choosen at random because they
require interpretation by the simulator. Currently the simulator is
ignorant of this.
This change introduces an unofficial SSC call SSC_SAL_SET_VECTORS
which is ignored by the simulator.
Tested with: ski (version 0.943 for linux)
NB: But it will enable it in all kernels not having options "NO_GEOM"
Put the GEOM related options into the intended order.
Add "options NO_GEOM" to all kernel configs apart from NOTES.
In some order of controlled fashion, the NO_GEOM options will be
removed, architecture by architecture in the coming days.
There are currently three known issues which may force people to
need the NO_GEOM option:
boot0cfg/fdisk:
Tries to update the MBR while it is being used to control
slices. GEOM does not allow this as a direct operation.
SCSI floppy drives:
Appearantly the scsi-da driver return "EBUSY" if no media
is inserted. This is wrong, it should return ENXIO.
PC98:
It is unclear if GEOM correctly recognizes all variants of
PC98 disklabels. (Help Wanted! I have neither docs nor HW)
These issues are all being worked.
Sponsored by: DARPA & NAI Labs.
