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Date:      Sun, 11 Jan 1998 10:20:09 -0700
From:      Ian Logan <ian@nmsu.edu>
To:        Jason Evans <jasone@canonware.com>
Cc:        freebsd-sparc@FreeBSD.ORG, Chris Toshok <toshok@hungry.com>
Subject:   Re: How UltraAX boots
Message-ID:  <34B8FF49.42027ECC@nmsu.edu>
References:  <Pine.BSF.3.96.980111042449.533O-100000@mozart.canonware.com>

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Jason Evans wrote:

> We're going to be facing a big bang problem as far as booting goes.  In
> order to get a serial console working, it looks like we'll have to have
> the UPA, PCI, and EBus code working, in addition to serial code (just need
> to port the serial code).  So, we'll pretty much have to make the whole
> motherboard work all at once, unless we can route the console through OBP
> (seems unlikely, or at least problematic). Yuck.

Actually it shouldn't be too bad :)  OBP has functions that work almost
like printf and they automaticly send their output to whatever output
device is set in the enviroment variables, I believe they are
output-device and input-device.  For example, the startup code in
sys/sparc/sparc/locore.s uses these functions to printout a message if
it's running on a unsupported CPU.

In Linux they wrote a little library of interface functions for the
prom, so we could do the same thing.  Then just pick our output function
based on a #define. 
ie.
#if defined(PROM_DEBUG)
	prom_printf(...)
#else
	printf(...)
#endif

Of course this is still pretty ugly, but it could be a lot worse.
	Ian
-- 
Ian Logan
Computing & Networking
New Mexico State University
Email: ian@nmsu.edu Phone: 505-646-6034 Fax: 505-646-5278



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