TetraPower 970MP (CANCELED) Project
Low-Level Service Processor Script developmentin category Hardware
proposed by bboettjer on 1st March 2006
Project Proposal
The service processor needs to bring the processor and bridge through a complicated POR procedure in which the elastic bus is brought up and sync\'d. The processors also need something called a \'mode-ring\', approx 1700 bits downloaded to the processor over I2C. Random bits are flipped with an IBM proprietary mask to ensure that reverse engineering is not successful. Getting this bitstream into the processor, over I2C is not trivial.The boot resource also has to be found and enumerated from the service processor, such that the processors can simply assert their reset vector and get data. This usually entails early enumeration of HyperTransport, through bridges to the southbridge, where the boot resource usually resides.
The end of this procedure yeilds processor(s) who boot from any boot vector the user desires (set in the mode ring) and have memory immediatley available.
There are several bootloaders available. If possible, running Linux on the Service Processor is the best approach.
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