Improve PC386 BSP

[Tanu Hari Dixit]

Improve PC386 BSP

Status:

Uninitiated.

Introduction:

This project involves addressing a few deficiencies in the existing pc386 BSP as well as improving it so it supports non-legacy hardware configurations.

Goal:

To have a functioning pc386 BSP that can operate on PCs without legacy BIOS or peripherals. It needs to support all features of RTEMS including SMP and Thread Local Storage.

Requirements:

• Knowledge of x86 ASM, C Programming language.
• Run on non-legacy hardware configurations.
• Share code as possible with new x86_64 BSP (when exists).
• Add Thread Local Storage support to x86 (#2468)
• Thread migration is broken on SMP on x86 (#2183)

There are at least the following tasks identified related to support of non-legacy PC configurations. A non-legacy PC appears to be one in which at least EFI is used instead of BIOS.

• Support video on non-legacy systems. Probe for video is known to fail on non-legacy systems.
• Support PCI on non-legacy systems. Probe for PCI BIOS is known to fail on non-legacy systems. It is expected that PCI bus access routines will need to be provided for non-legacy configurations.
• Support for APIC rather than legacy PIC.

It is a requirement for code to be shared with x86_64 when that is supported. It is also a requirement for the pc386 BSP to support both legacy and non-legacy and decide what to do at run-time.

Resources:

• Current RTEMS developers.
• Do not reinvent the wheel and use existing code instead, e.g. from FreeBSD.