2.3 KiB
x86 architecture documentation
This section contains documentation about coreboot on x86 architecture.
State of x86_64 support
At the moment there's only experimental x86_64 support.
The emulation/qemu-i440fx
and emulation/qemu-q35
boards do support
ARCH_RAMSTAGE_X86_64 , ARCH_POSTCAR_X86_64 and ARCH_ROMSTAGE_X86_64.
In order to add support for x86_64 the following assumptions were made:
- The CPU supports long mode
- All memory returned by malloc must be below 4GiB in physical memory
- All code that is to be run must be below 4GiB in physical memory
- The high dword of pointers is always zero
- The reference implementation is qemu
- The CPU supports 1GiB hugepages
- x86 payloads are loaded below 4GiB in physical memory and are jumped to in protected mode
Assuptions for all stages using the reference implementation
- 0-4GiB are identity mapped using 2MiB-pages as WB
- Memory above 4GiB isn't accessible
- page tables reside in memory mapped ROM
- A stage can install new page tables in RAM
Page tables
Page tables are generated by a tool in util/pgtblgen/pgtblgen
. It writes
the page tables to a file which is then included into the CBFS as file called
pagetables
.
To generate the static page tables it must know the physical address where to place the file.
The page tables contains the following structure:
- PML4E pointing to PDPE
- PDPE with $n entries each pointing to PDE
- $n PDEs with 512 entries each
At the moment $n is 4, which results in identity mapping the lower 4 GiB.
Basic x86_64 support
Basic support for x86_64 has been implemented for QEMU mainboard target.
Reference implementation
The reference implementation is
TODO
- Identity map memory above 4GiB in ramstage
Future work
- Fine grained page tables for SMM:
- Must not have execute and write permissions for the same page.
- Must allow only that TSEG pages can be marked executable
- Must reside in SMRAM
- Support 64bit PCI BARs above 4GiB
- Place and run code above 4GiB
Porting other boards
- Fix compilation errors
- Test how well CAR works with x86_64 and paging
- Improve mode switches
- Test libgfxinit / VGA Option ROMs / FSP