coreboot May 2003

coreboot@coreboot.org

70 participants
143 discussions

Experiences on Etherboot for IDE Compact flash and FLASHROMS
by dkotian3＠vsnl.net 03 May '03

03 May '03

Hi, Can some please list one's experiences on Etherboot to boot from IDE Compact flash over here. Basically, I have to put the etherboot payload and LinuxBIOS on 256K/512K FLASH ROMS and the Linux kernel image(2.4.18-3) and application on Compact Flash ide. Some kind of HOWTO/experience from many who have tried etherboot in this situation. If one can clearly give out the list or a link where one can find this document for this kind setup for etherboot. It would be great. Thanks and Regards Deepak Thanks and Regards Deepak

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Bounce buffers and stack
by steven james 02 May '03

02 May '03

Greetings, I'm doing some work on payloads, chaining, and returning from an elf image and have run into an 'interesting' problem. Currently, when elfload sees that an image will overwrite LinuxBIOS, it moves everything (including the stack) up into high memory. So far, so good. However, in the case where it will not overwrite, it leaves things alone. The problem comes in where the payload then loads an image over the stack. So, for example, LinuxBIOS loads payload at 0x1000-0x4000, payload loads image at 0x5000-0x10000 and BOOM. The best bet is to have the first payload move the stack to the top of ram under the 4GB mark and somehow mark that memory as 'pre-boot reserved', meaning that bootloaders should leave it alone, but a final boot target such as Linux may use it after moving the stack. The idea is to allow for chaining by having each stage reserve it's chunk of memory (including bounce buffer) at top of ram-reserved, then move reserved down. jmp_to_elf_entry then just worries about IP and leaves ESP and EBP alone. Ideally, LinuxBIOS itself would create the stack high in the first place, but we are near the freeze, and the first stage payload can easily enough handle the ugliness and set a flag within baremetal to deal with this. Any thoughts? G'day, sjames -- -------------------------steven james, director of research, linux labs ... ........ ..... .... 230 peachtree st nw ste 2701 the original linux labs atlanta.ga.us 30303 -since 1995 http://www.linuxlabs.com office 404.577.7747 fax 404.577.7743 -----------------------------------------------------------------------

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Sourceforge CVS
by Russell Gower 02 May '03

02 May '03

Has something change with sourceforges cvs since Feburary as i can't do an anonymous login any more. help :-) Russell ICQ 4186920

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EEPROM not found
by Philippe CABANNES 02 May '03

02 May '03

>> I think the flash write enabled, I use this : >> setpci -s 0:11.0 40.b=54 >send me an lspci. Are you sure this is the right chip? I don´t know if it´s the right chip. Here is my lspci : 00:00.0 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc.: Unknow device 3123 00:01.0 PCI bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8633 [Apollo Pro266 AGP] 00:0d.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): VIA Technologies, Inc. OHCI Compliant IEEE 1394 Host Controller (rev 80) 00:10.0 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. UHCI USB (rev 80) 00:10.1 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. UHCI USB (rev 80) 00:10.2 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. UHCI USB (rev 80) 00:10.3 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc.: Unknow device 3104(rev 80) 00:11.0 ISA bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc.: Unknow device 3177 00:11.1 IDE interface: VIA Technologies, Inc: Bus Master IDE (rev 06) 00:11.5 Multimedia audio controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. AC97 Audio Controller (rev 50) 00:12.0 Ethernet controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. Ethernet Controller (rev 74) 01:00.0 VGA Compatible controller: VIA Technologies, Inc.: Unknow device 3122 (rev 03) thanks. -------------------------------------------------- Oreka ! Nous sommes l'internet moins cher ! Surfez 25% moins cher avec http://www.oreka.com

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EEPROM not found
by Philippe CABANNES 02 May '03

02 May '03

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flash utility
by Nhan NGO DINH 02 May '03

02 May '03

I've a Lex CV860A motherboard, which support has been recently added to LinuxBIOS. I can't find any flash program for that: the flash chip is an AMIC A290021TL-70. http://www.amictechnology.com/pdf/A290021.pdf Does mtd in Linux kernel support this kind of stuff? Thx. Nhan

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PCMCIA Support
by tcc_linuxbios＠thinkthink.com 02 May '03

02 May '03

The reason I'm interested in linuxbios is that I'd like to create a self-contained (not remote booted) no-moving-parts system for ruggetized use. I'd be open to a better idea - but so far I'm thinking of putting an OpenBSD fs on a pcmcia ATA flash card and access it through one of those PCI<->pcmcia cards. This should make for a neat off-the-shelf system for firewalls, gateways, etc. Most bios's don't support pcmcia because most mb's don't have pcmcia hw... Therefore my linuxbios interest. Has anyone considered putting in PCMCIA support? A grep of sources and mail archive comes up blank, except for booting off of CF. CF would work but I suspect I have to buy a special (read expensive) mb that has CF support. Am I getting myself into a project? :) tom.c

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(no subject)
by tcc_linuxbios＠thinkthink.com 02 May '03

02 May '03

I see people are using linuxbios in embedded systems for booting the embedded kernel. Why does linuxbios have to boot anything? I would think for an embedded system that is using linux anyway, you could just use the linuxbios linux as your kernel. thanx, tom.c LinuxBIOS as the, "real" kernel...

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440bx ownership
by Richard Smith 01 May '03

01 May '03

I see the 440bx is listed as unsupported. Guess I need to pick up ownership of that. What do I need to do? -- Richard A. Smith rsmith(a)bitworks.com

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FAQ Ver 0.0.2
by Richard Smith 01 May '03

01 May '03

After I sent that I realized that the word wrap was greater than 80 charactes. Told you it was raw. Heres a version wraped to 80 columns. -- Richard A. Smith rsmith(a)bitworks.com LinuxBIOS FAQ Ver 0.0.2 Richard A. Smith <rsmith(a)bitworks.com> Credits. Various portions of this document were derived from posts on the linuxBIOS mailing list. I neglected to keep who said what in a lot of cases. My apologies to those people. Let me know if you want credit for what you wrote and I'll add it in. Where is the linuxBIOS webpage? http://www.linuxbios.org What kind of coding skills are necessary to work with LinuxBIOS? You better be comfortable with assembly language as LinuxBIOS has a lot of it. LinuxBIOS switches to protected mode and a C enviroment as soon as it can but there is a lot of hardware init that has to happen first. Most of this happens in assembly _WITHOUT_ a stack! Very tedious to debug. Grokking the SDRAM init process is a very humbleing experience. DDR is said to be worse. Strong C skills are also a plus as most of LinuxBIOS and friends is/are written in C. You should also not be afraid of digging hip deep in chipset datasheets and attempting to mind read what the chipset designers were really trying to say when they wrote the documentation. Sometimes its less than clear. LinuxBIOS is a _very_ hands-on-study-the-code type project. What kind of hardware do I need? A motherboard (or mainboard as LinuxBIOS calls it) that has a supported chipset on it. Ok.. Well not exactly. As long as you have the documentation for the chipset/mainboard and its free of any NDA issues you can use an unsupported chipset/Mainboard but you have a _long_ twisty road ahead of you. And of course you need a Linux developemnet machine. The LinuxBIOS build enviroment is not supported on windows. Here's a list of the currently supported chipsets/Mainboards http://www.linuxbios.org/status/index.html It's also handy to have one/some/all of the following: - EPROM/Flash programmer that can program the flash on your motherboard. - ROM emulator - Bios Savior http://www.ioss.com.tw/web/English/RD1BIOSSavior.html - Compact Flash IDE adaptor <Need some links to CF adapters> - Oscilliscope - In Circuit Emulator hardware debugger How can I tell if my motherboard/chipset is supported by LinuxBIOS? Check: http://www.linuxbios.org/status/index.html If you don't see your chipset/Mainboard listed there then boot linux on your target and send the output of 'lspci -vvv' to the linuxBIOS list asking if this chipset might be supported. What documentation do I need? As much as you can possibly get a hold of. Minimum you need the docs for your chipset. Without chipset docs you are basically lost. There have been some reports of people making things work by popping in the BIOS that comes with the board. Dumping the PCI config registers and then making LinuxBIOS match those registers. But since sometimes you have to set different bits in a given register at different times it can be a vere long and involved process. What documentation for linuxBIOS exists? You got the source. What more do you need? *grin* Unfortunaly there is very little documentation for linuxBIOS right now and what docs there are tend to be stale. Use the source Luke. One thing to note is that LinuxBIOS has reached a stage where a good bit of newer users are coming on-line and thus the signal-to-noise level of the mailing list is beginning to decrease. The mailing list archives have *TONS* of good information in them I would say its required reading. Start at the beginning of the year or at least 3 to 4 months ago and read the various questions/responses. Chances are you will find serveral references to a setup similar to yours. Once you have gone through the mailing list navigating the LinuxBIOS code and dealing with the many config options will be much eaiser. I don't have an EPROM/FLASH programmer. What are my options? For a mainboard with a flash thats socketed or has a flash recovery setup. Its possible to work with linuxBIOS without a EPROM/Flash programmer. Personally I don't recommend it. Especially if your Flash is soldered onto the mainboard. Screw that up and the Mainboard is toast. Some motherboards have a flash recovery method that you can set for when you munge the flash. This enables a known good BIOS boot image that will allow you to recover when you screw up. The BIOS savior also works similar to this. It allows you to have 2 different BIOS images and choose the one you want to boot from. Which different operating systems will LinuxBIOS boot? <Someone please fill this in> What payloads can/has linuxBIOS boot/booted? Linux Kernel regular - use as your OS kernel Linux Kernel Kexec bootloader - boots another linux kernel from a device supported by linux (I don't know where this payload stands as a formal package) Memtest86 - great memory tester Plan9 - Plan9 OS 9load ADLO + Bochs BIOS - Interrupt support, boots BSDs and Win2k Etherboot standard - kernel over ethernet Etherboot devel branch - kernel over ethernet and raw disk i/o Etherboot 5.0.6 polled ide patch - kernel over ethernet and buggy file system support Etherboot SIS patch - kernel over ethernet, file system support, and booting WinCE I think (but I don't know if SIS has let this out formally) RedBoot - could read the file system but never had the elf support to make it really usefull Steven James ELF finder - I think this was written as payload? Anyway, it lets you choose from payloads in your rom. What is ADLO? See the following url: http://www.missl.cs.umd.edu/Projects/sebos/phase2.shtml But basically its the glue which bonds LinuxBIOS to the PC BIOS of the Bochs project. It allows you to boot some OS's that depend on legacy BIOS services. What bios services does ADLO provide and when would I need them. The full gory details are at: http://www.missl.cs.umd.edu/Projects/sebos/winint/index2.html How do I get LinuxBIOS to boot ADLO? ADLO compiles as an ELF image so you have to set up LinuxBIOS to elf boot just as if you were using etherboot. Go read the etherboot IDE section of this faq and get to where you can boot etherboot. ADLO is distributed with LinuxBIOS in the freebios/util/ADLO directory. Int that directory are some README's. Make sure you have read them. Compiling ADLO is quite simple. Mostly you just type 'make' You need a copy of your video BIOS if you want VGA to work. Again see the README. Out-of-the box ADLO probally won't boot unless you are using the exact mainboard that the ADLO project uses. The reason is that various areas of shadowing must be enabled for ADLO to boot. If you see elfboot indicate that its 'Jumping to boot code at 0x7c00' and then the board resets or hangs then its very likely that your shadow settings are incorrect. Applying the serial debug patch to ADLO can help you further investigate this. <Where is the defacto location for the serial patch? > The shadow settings are set in loader.s in the freebios/util/ADLO. Find section B) These are writes to PCI space that enable various areas of shadowing. Technically all you need is the only 64kb at 0xF0000 and 64kb at 0xC0000. Your mileage may vary. I would start by enabling Read/Write for all shadow ranges supported by your chipset and then backing off to 0xF0000 and 0xC0000 after you get it working. The ADLO makefile will copy your video bios from an existing setup. See the README and makefile for details. If you have one of the BIOS kits provided by the video chipset mfg for your board then you may have a stock image an then a program that allows you to customize the stock image. If so then you need to set things up so that the video bios is set to be loaded at 0x0C0000 (sometimes called the C000 segment) Also I found that ADLO expected the video bios to be 64k in size whereas my image file was only 32k. I solved this by just copying it twice in the same file and then letting ADLO use that. Some creative work with 'dd' would probally achieve the same result. Lastly if you have applied the serial debug patch to BOCHS then _all_ the output is routed out to the serial port so your video screen will be blank. However VSYNC will still be generated if the video chip is initialized properly. You can watch for VSYNC with a Oscope or plug a newer type monitor up to the video output. Most modern monitors will tell you when they can/can't find the VSYNC signal. Note you may have to power cycle the monitor between attempts as sometimes they can get very confused. If I burn ADLO along with linuxbios on rom do we need to specify BOOT_IDE=1? Nope. BOOT_IDE is merely to use the ide support thats directly in LinuxBIOS, in which case it would skip right over ADLO. My kernel won't fit in ROM so how do I boot? If you aren't blessed with a 8Mbit or larger flash there are a few other options. - Load from the net via etherboot - Load from IDE via etherboot - Load from IDE via ADLO - Load from Msystems Disk on Chip (DoC) How do I load a kernel from IDE? Currently there are 3 different methods. 1. Etherboot 5.0.6 with polled ide patch: Download etherboot-5.0.6 and see http://www.missl.cs.umd.edu/~agnew/ for the patch. 2. Etherboot development series: Download >= etherboot-5.1.7 3. ADLO see freebios/utils/ADLO/ from the linuxbios cvs. (this one is the most work, but wont require you to modify your kernel when you're done) How do I make LB use etherboot IDE? First you need to go get etherboot and compile it. You either get the developement branch with IDE support or the stable branch which need a patch to work. Now modify the etherboot config file so that its compatible with LB. Specifically the ./src/Config file and the arch/<your arch>/Config file For Ver 5.1.8 The options you need to make sure are set are: -DELF_IMAGE -DLINUXBIOS -DCONFIG_TSC_CURRTICKS -DCONFIG_PCI_DIRECT there are other options that are helpful like -DCONSOLE_SERIAL -DCOMCONSOLE=xxx The option(s) you need to make sure it NOT set are: -DPCBIOS Then compile etherboot. You want to compile with a specific make command so that it generates the elfimage for LB to load. This is done by taggin the .zelf on to your normal makefile command. For example to make the polling IDE loader elf image you need: make bin/ide_disk.zelf For Ver 5.0.x: <Someone needs to fill in the info for the earlier version> Now modify your linuxbios config file to include: option USE_ELF_BOOT=1 option PAYLOAD_SIZE=<size of you etherboot payload> payload /path/to/your/etherboot/driver You also need an input stream for the elfboot code to read from so you must set one (or more?) of the following options. USE_GENERIC_ROM=1 <What are all the other stream options?> Now you need to create an elf kernel for the ether boot code to find. Go fetch the mkelfimage command at ftp://ftp.lnxi.com/pub/src/mkelfImage/ Generally the latest one is better. Note that there are several older versions of binutils that are broken and mkelfimage will expose those bugs. Insure that you are running a recient copy of binutils. The following shows the version output from a known working bintuils. # as --version GNU assembler 2.13.90.0.10 20021010 Debian GNU/Linux Now compile mkelfimage. Which should be as easy as ./configure, make, make install You can now create a elf kernel. Change to the directory where the image file for you kernel is. Normally this is somewhere in the kernel tree. In my case this is is arch/i386/boot and the kernel image is bzImage. By defaut mkelfimage is installed in /usr/local/sbin so you would do /usr/local/sbin/mkelfimage bzImage elfimage Now you have your kernel elfized in the file 'elfimage' mkelfimage support several options for adding commandlines and initrd's to the kernel image type 'mkelfimage' without any arguments for the details. Ok final setp. Locate the kernel on the IDE device. Etherboot currently searchs the first 8k of disk space for the elf header. So you have to locate the start of that kernel within that space. If you don't care about having a proper partition table on your disk then you can just splat the kernel at the front of the disk. For the rest of the examples lets assume your disk is mounted in your *developement* machine as /dev/hde The following will write the kernel at the beginning of the IDE device. # cat elfimage > /dev/hde This works well if you don't need the IDE device for anything other than booting. If you want a filesystem on the device as well then you are going to have to protect the partition table as well. Currently the hack for accomplishing this is dd if=elfimage of=/dev/hde bs=4096 seek=1 This will skip over the partition table and write the data in the area where the first partition would normally be. So you have to create a disk with at least 2 partitions. /dev/hde1 should be large enough to hold your kernel plus any initrd you may want. You can then put your filesystem on /dev/hde2 Note. It appears that some version of dd may whine about /dev/hde being an "Invalid argument" but it appears to write the data to the disk anyway. What do those IDE options mean? See IDE section in Appendix A. How do I make the prephials work on a National SCx2xx under linuxBIOS? The SCx2xx series have this feature where binary-only code gets executed in SMM (System Management Mode) when you (or kernel drivers) access certain addresses. It's called VSA, Virtual System Architecture. There's also VSA2 which adds something. NSC supplies some binary VSMs (Virtual System Modules) with their royalty free BIOS kit BLDT (BootLoader Development Toolkit), aka XpressLOADER. Among others, there are VSMs for enabling audio and video. LinuxBIOS does not currently implement VSA or VSA2. I see no reason why it couldn't, though, I even think it could be made as a separate ELF object loaded in the same way the bare bones toolkit is, I seem to remember the idea of being able to plug multiple ELF objects into the bootup sequence but this still requires some twiddling, right? NSC offers documentation on VSA/VSA2 but I'm not sure about availability.. NSC also offer a Linux audio driver for the SCx2xx family but this driver requires the XpressAUDIO VSM to work. Help! I'm a newbie and I'm completely lost in the code. There seem to be two main parts to linuxbios. The first is arch/{arch}/config/ctr0.base which does the very low level initialization, like turning on memory, etc. The second is arch/{arch}/lib/c_start.S which does whatever else is necessary to call the C function hardwaremain(). hardwaremain() then does whatever else is necessary to load linux. c_start.S is linked with linuxbios.a, a library containing generic support routines (those found in the lib directory) and anything specified using the 'object' directive in a Config file (and other stuff). The resultant 'executable' is called linuxbios_c. The loader script used to link linuxbios_c is config/linuxbios_c.ld, and is configured to be loaded relative to _RAMBASE. crt0.base is not linked against anything. Any additional assembly routines you need must be specified using the 'mainboardinit' directive in a Config file. This causes the specified assembly file to be added to "crt0_includes.h" which is in turn included at the start of crt0.base (or at the end in the case of the ppc version). The loader script used to link crt0.base is in arch/{arch}/config/ldscript.base. The resultant 'executable' is called linuxbios and will be loaded at _ROMBASE. The tricky thing is that this loader script will also load the linuxbios_c 'executable' at a location called _payload in this file. The main task of crt0.base is then to initialize enough hardware so that this payload can be copied from rom into ram (which may also involve uncompressing code). Then control is transferred to _start, which is the first location in linuxbios_c. To get an idea of how crt0.base works, look at the following files. This is the order of execution specified by the configuration file for sis735. cpu/i386/entry16.inc cpu/i386/entry32.inc superio/sis/950/setup_serial.inc pc80/serial.inc arch/i386/lib/console.inc cpu/k7/earlymtrr.inc northsouthbridge/sis/735/raminit.inc arch/i386/config/crt0.base Next look at c_start.S which will show you what happens once control is transferred to _start. Finally, look at arch/{arch}/lib/hardwaremain.c to see what other stuff is done to get linux loaded. Most other files are specific to particular hardware, so it can be pretty confusing to just browse the tree. What do I need to get started with linuxbios on a new motherboard ? First do a 'lspci' on that motherboard and determine what chipset is being used. Then search through the LinuxBIOS src/mainboard tree and see if any motherboards that are already supported are close to the chipset you have. If there isn't a good match then you will have to go aquire all the datasheets for the chipset used on that motherboard. Depending on the NDA stance of the manufacurer this may or may not be an easy task. Once you have all the technical data for the motherboard in question you create a directory(s) below the src/mainboard directory with the mfg and boardname of your motherboard. ie. if you have the 'superfoo5' motherboard made by Fooboards, Inc. you would create the following directory. src/mainboard/fooboards/superfoo5 Then if you found a motherboard that was close you can copy in all the files from that motherboard. Otherwise you start from scratch in which case you should use some of the other motherboards setups as templates and rework them to your needs. [Perhaps we need to setup a blank template directory just for this purpose?] Is there a reference for all the options in the config file? While no defacto reference exists beyond the source code I've collected as much as I can from gleaning the mailing list and my own experience with the code. See appendix A for that reference. Appendix A. Code location options. Key: <bool> 1 or 0 1=active 0=inactive <address> hex address. ie 0x0ffff or 0xffff0000 include the '0x' prefix <n> decimal number ie 2 or 5, etc <hexval> hex number ie. 0x0000ffff option BIOSBASE=<address> default = 0xf0000 I believe this region is automatically cached by linuxbios (maybe not?). If biosbase is set to 0xffff0000, then in your config you need to set: option XIP_ROM_SIZE= 0x01000000 default = ? option XIP_ROM_BASE= 0xff000000 default = ? This will cache the upper 16M of the 4G address space. Basically, the chipsets generally map both to the same physical memory, the flash, ie, they aliasing 0xf0000 to 0xffff0000. You can cover 0xf0000 with ram, by setting proper bits in the bridge, but not 0xffff0000. But on startup by default most if not all chipsets alias the top 64k under 1M to the top 64k under 4G. It all has to do with legacy, real-mode stuff. linuxbios is in 32-bit mode, though, after a few initial instructions. IDE Options option BOOT_IDE=<bool> default = 0 This enables booting from IDE, the file to use is linux.bin.gz: More specifically it controls the compile and linking in of freebios/src/rom/ide_fill_inbuff.o option IDE_BOOT_DRIVE=<n> default = 0 If you do not use drive 0 (default), then you can set which drive to boot; (0,1,2,3) are the four standard PC drives: option ONE_TRACK=<n> default = 63 The linux.bin.gz file is put in raw form at partition 1, ie, the first partition on the disk. This is located just past the partition table. The partition table size varies, it is "one track" from the beginning of the disk. "one track" in c/h/s notation is "s" or the number of sectors per track. ONE_TRACK is in sectors, the software multiplies by 512. Most disks are 63 sectors per track (the default), but my CF is 32 sectors per track. eg, the partion table is 63x512 or 32x512 bytes. You can partition your disk as you want, but linux goes raw in partition 1; just make sure partition 1 is big enough, not a problem on today's disks. You could put the linux root file system on partition 2, for example. In pcchips787.config, I put the linux root file system on IDE 0, partition 2 (I was experimenting with linux in partition 1), but I eventually put linux on drive 2 using CF. You are right, copying of linux.bin.gz raw to the partition is dangerous, and something like "cat linux.bin.gz > /dev/hda1" will definitely screw the disk if you put the wrong disk or partition. I recommend a shell script, fingers cannot be trusted. You can also use "dd" but "cat" works. option STD_FLASH=<bool> default = ? In the sis northsouthbridge ipl.S code this controls some settings. <sis person please fill in more detail> option USE_GENERIC_ROM=<bool> default = ? Controls the linking in of freebios/src/rom/rom_fill_inbuf.c <someone please explain this in more detail> option ZKERNEL_START=<address> default = 0xfff00000 The address where the kernel is located in the ROM. Data at this address is copied to the RAM destination address. option ZKERNEL_MASK=<hexval> default = 0x0000ffff <someone please explain this in more detail> Boot options. option USE_ELF_BOOT=<bool> default = 0 Controls the building and linking of the elf image boot code. option PAYLOAD_SIZE = <n> default = ? Sets the size of the elf payload that is added to the LB rom image. Logging options option DEFAULT_CONSOLE_LOGLEVEL default = 8 Sets the default for the ammount of verbosity LB uses to tell you whats happining. Default is for printk_spew which is the most info possible from LB option MAXIMUM_CONSOLE_LOGLEVEL default = 8 Max value of loglevel. If DEFAULT_CONSOLE_LOGLEVEL is higher than this it gets set to this value.

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coreboot May 2003