I've seen a lot of systems (including brand new Xeon-based servers from
IBM and HP) that output messages on boot like:
PCI: BIOS Bug: MCFG area at f0000000 is not E820-reserved
PCI: Not using MMCONFIG.
As I understand it, this is sort of a sanity check mechanism to make
sure the MCFG address reported is remotely reasonable and intended to be
used as such. Problem is, I doubt the BIOS authors would agree that this
constitutes a bug. Microsoft is providing a lot of the direction for
BIOS writers, and have a look at this presentation "PCI Express,
Windows, And The Legacy Transition" from back in 2004:
http://download.microsoft.com/download/1/8/f/18f8cee2-0b64-41f2-893d-a6f2295b40c8/TW04047_WINHEC2004.ppt
On page 14, "Existing Windows - Reserve MMCONFIG":
Existing Windows versions won’t understand MCFG table
* Backwards-compatible range reservation must be used
Report range in ACPI "Motherboard Resources"
*_CRS of PNP0C02 node
* PNP0C02 must be at \_SB scope
* Range must be marked as consumed
Do not include range in _CRS of PCI root bus
* If included, OS will assume that this range can be allocated to devices
E820 table/EFI memory map
* Not necessary to describe MMConfig here
* For Windows, these are used to describe RAM
* No harm in including range as reserved either
So Microsoft is explicitly telling the BIOS developers that there is no
need to reserve the MMCONFIG space in the E820 table because Windows
doesn't care. On that basis it doesn't seem like a valid check to
require it to be so reserved, then.
Really, I think we should be basing this check on whether the
corresponding memory range is reserved in the ACPI resources, like
Windows expects. This does require putting more fingers into ACPI from
this early boot stage, though..
--
Robert Hancock Saskatoon, SK, Canada
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Home Page: http://www.roberthancock.com/
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