QEMU currently provides the console via HTIF and the SBI. That's a bit
messy because BBL polls for serial input, which means that typing too
quickly loses characters. While QEMU has a standard 16550 device model,
there's no way to have two consoles share the console in QEMU (as they'd
step all over each other) so that means we can't have both the HTIF
console and the 16550 console.
With this patch, QEMU can be changed to use a 16650 instead of the HTIF
for serial output. Linux will use the SBI for early printk support
(which is fine, polling for output is stable) and then swap over as soon
as it detects the UART. When Linux swaps it prints out the whole
history, but there's probably a way to get around that. There's a few
lines that are output to both, but it appears the Linux driver is close
enough to ours that nothing catastrophic happens -- there's not much to
the device, so hopefully that pans out on real hardware too.
Once Linux swaps over to natively using the driver we get reliable
console input. If you don't have the in-kernel driver then Linux never
swaps over and keeps using the SBI console just like before.
I'm trying to debug some device tree problems while booting Linux and
figured it would be really nice to have access to the device tree while
trying to debug these problems. I think this might be useful for lots
of people, so I went ahead and cleaned up the code enough that it should
actaully work in most cases.
Since we don't have a coherent platform specification right now, we've
ended up with slightly different platforms between spike and our FPGA
dev kit. For now I've added an autoconf option that allows users to
select the relevant platform.
Some platforms can't boot Linux on all the harts. This commit allows
platforms to define the set of harts that should be prevented from
booting past BBL. This is essentially just a new mechanism for defining
the DISABLED_HART_MASK.
SiFive's pk fork is the second one I've had to maintain, and it's a huge
pain because people keep just leaving changes all over the tree. I want
to introduce an interface that the platform-specific details can live
behind so I don't have to keep doing these painful merges.
Palmer Dabbelt
Zong Li
Andrew Waterman
Andrew Waterman
Wesley W. Terpstra