December 2005 - coreboot - mail.coreboot.org

[LinuxBIOS] patches
by Ronald G Minnich Dec. 4, 2005

Dec. 4, 2005

Guys, starting next week, I think we only take patches that are known to be a delta from an SVN-based repository. This current situation is not acceptable -- I believe some of these patches are coming from the old ARCH repo, which is quite out of date. OK? Can everyone please sync up with the svn tree? thanks ron

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[LinuxBIOS] Geode GX1 and IRQ tables
by joep＠frog.nl Dec. 4, 2005

Dec. 4, 2005

This week I started to create a linuxbios for an embedded Geode GX1 board (Kontron ETX-mgx). I was delighted to see that it was able to boot Linux at the first try! Off course there remain some issues that need to be solved. The first thing I ran into is that I can't use the ethernet controller. When I try to load the ethernet module (dmfe.o) I get this message: PCI: No IRQ known for interrupt pin A of device 00:02.0. Please try using pci=biosirq This reason is that linux is not able to locate the interrupt table, because linuxbios failed to copy the table to the area at 0xf0000: .... Copying IRQ routing tables to 0xf0000...done. Verifing copy of IRQ routing tables at 0xf0000...failed Moving GDT to 0x500...ok Wrote linuxbios table at: 00000530 - 000006b4 checksum e72d I saw that this issue was discussed earlier in this list (March 2005, started by ramesh), but I found no reference as to if and how it was ever solved. Any answers? Thanks, Joep Jansen

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[LinuxBIOS] LinuxBIOS messing with CMOS on reboot?
by Stefan Reinauer Dec. 3, 2005

Dec. 3, 2005

Hi, I'm seeing a weird problem while switching back and forth between a legacy bios and LinuxBIOS. I have a 256 byte cmos image created with cmos_util and a 512k bios image for each firmware flavour. Switching from legacy bios to LinuxBIOS works fine using flashrom and cmos_util. Switching the other way round always leaves legacy bios with a wrong checksum on the first boot. writing the cmos from the file afterwards and rebooting is fine, so it's not the cmos image that is wrong. Could LinuxBIOS change the CMOS when doing a reboot? Or is legacy bios doing some very weird things like safing additional data in mystic places? Stefan

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[LinuxBIOS] cmos checksum in linuxbios table
by Stefan Reinauer Dec. 3, 2005

Dec. 3, 2005

Hi, I suggest putting the cmos checksum areas into the LinuxBIOS table. This was obviously planned a long time ago and I already implemented support for that in the lxbios utility. See below patch to implement this thing in LinuxBIOS. Stefan

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[LinuxBIOS] EPIA M-II (CF Boot)
by Carl Farrington Dec. 3, 2005

Dec. 3, 2005

I would like to add my name to the list of people who have suceeded with the EPIA-MII LinuxBIOS. The VGA BIOS offset given by Nick Barker was no good for my board (Model: EPIA-Mii12000 LVDS), I had to use skip=786432 as suggested by Jun. I am having problems with the kernel recognising the CF device as hde1 though. I am able to manually mount hde1 from a diagnostics shell within the initrd after running cardmgr, so it is available, but once I exit the shell the kernel is saying it can't find hde1. I'm not sure if Nick used devfs with his setup, but that's not available for my 2.6.14 kernel. I have used mknod to create the device, and also tried using udevstart but still have the same problem. I wonder if it's something to do with me having all the pcmcia stuff compiled directly into the kernel instead of as loadable modules? Unfortunately I'm quite rusty with Linux! Anyway, I suppose this is a bit off topic. The LinuxBIOS seems to work great, thank you, and big thanks to Nick for all your work on the EPIA M2. Oh, by the way, I used Award's AWDFLASH to flash linuxbios.bin. Using the undocumented /F option. Nick's HOWTO talked about a flash_and_burn utility which wasn't in the tree, and the flashrom tool just wouldn't compile for me for some reason. AWDFLASH worked, except for some strange quirks. I can't be certain if it was due to bad floppies on my part, but for some reason I felt I was having better success overwriting a good bios, rather than re-trying on a failed flash. The machine would go loopy sometimes. It all works now anyway. cheers, Carl

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Re: [LinuxBIOS] FW: EPIA M-II (CF Boot)
by Ken Fuchs Dec. 3, 2005

Dec. 3, 2005

Carl Farrington wrote: >I am having problems with the kernel recognising the CF device as hde1 >though. I am able to manually mount hde1 from a diagnostics shell within >the initrd after running cardmgr, so it is available, but once I exit the >shell the kernel is saying it can't find hde1. Is it possible to use an ATA to CF adapter? There are both ATA-40 (desktop) and ATA-44 (laptop) plus dual CF versions. The ATA-40 are powered through a standard floppy drive power connector. I assume the ATA-44 versions are powered through the ATA-44 bus. There is a jumper to select master or slave. I bought one on eBay a couple of months ago for less than $6, including S+H. Works great! Search for "IDE" and "CF" though, since almost all resellers incorrectly use the term "IDE" when they really mean "ATA". Using an ATA to CF adapter would avoid the problems of using cardmgr in an initrd, etc. Obviously, the CF would not be hot swappable via the ATA interface, but if its your boot drive, it can't be swapped out anyway. Good luck! Sincerely, Ken Fuchs <kfuchs(a)winternet.com>

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Re: [LinuxBIOS] FW: EPIA M-II (CF Boot)
by Ken Fuchs Dec. 3, 2005

Dec. 3, 2005

Carl Farrington wrote: >I am having problems with the kernel recognising the CF device as hde1 >though. I am able to manually mount hde1 from a diagnostics shell within >the initrd after running cardmgr, so it is available, but once I exit the >shell the kernel is saying it can't find hde1. Is it possible to use an ATA to CF adapter? There are both ATA-40 (desktop) and ATA-44 (laptop) plus dual CF versions. The ATA-40 are powered through a standard floppy drive power connector. I assume the ATA-44 versions are powered through the ATA-44 bus. There is a jumper to select master or slave. I bought one on eBay a couple of months ago for less than $6, including S+H. Works great! Search for "IDE" and "CF" though, since almost all resellers incorrectly use the term "IDE" when they really mean "ATA". Using an ATA to CF adapter would avoid the problems of using cardmgr in an initrd, etc. Obviously, the CF would not be hot swappable via the ATA interface, but if its your boot drive, it can't be swapped out anyway. Good luck! Sincerely, Ken Fuchs <kfuchs(a)winternet.com>

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[LinuxBIOS] compile errors on tyan S2881
by Ward Vandewege Dec. 2, 2005

Dec. 2, 2005

Hi there, We have a couple of Tyan S2881 boxes that we want to run linuxbios on. I checked out the latest SVN repository (revision 2117), but get compile errors for the S2881 tree. This is the case on Debian testing/unstable with GCC 3.4.5 20051015 (prerelease) (Debian 3.4.4-9) and GCC 4.0.2 (Debian 4.0.2-2), as well as on Ubuntu Breezy with GCC 4.0.2 20050808 (prerelease) (Ubuntu 4.0.1-4ubuntu9). There are a lot more warnings when compiling with GCC 4, but it always dies on this: LinuxBIOSv2/src/cpu/amd/car/disable_cache_as_ram.c: At top level: LinuxBIOSv2/src/cpu/amd/car/disable_cache_as_ram.c:3: error: syntax error before 'volatile' Am I missing a dependency, or is this a bug? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Ward. -- Ward Vandewege <ward(a)fsf.org> Free Software Foundation - Senior System Administrator

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[LinuxBIOS] GCC - egcs - Linux - string in commercial BIOS module
by Borg No. One Dec. 2, 2005

Dec. 2, 2005

Hello. Accidentally, here...: http://www.acorp.com.tw/eng/download/download02.asp?pronameid=330&lineid=1 http://www.acorp.com.tw/eng/driver/INTEL/865/4865GQET/4865GQET14.zip ...I found a BIOS which contains an uncompressed BIOS module with the string: "GCC: (GNU) egcs-2.91.66 19990314/Linux (egcs-1.1.2 release)" Here is the CBROM32 output: CBROM32 V1.45 [08/03/04 Release] (C)Phoenix Technologies 2001-2004 ******** 4865GQET14.BIN BIOS component ******** No. Item-Name Original-Size Compressed-Size Original-File-Name ================================================================================ 0. System BIOS 20000h(128.00K) 1359Bh(77.40K) GQET.BIN 1. XGROUP CODE 0ACB0h(43.17K) 07560h(29.34K) awardext.rom 2. CPU micro code 04000h(16.00K) 03F9Fh(15.91K) CPUCODE.BIN 3. ACPI table 03A34h(14.55K) 0164Ah(5.57K) ACPITBL.BIN 4. EPA LOGO 0168Ch(5.64K) 002AAh(0.67K) AwardBmp.bmp 5. YGROUP ROM 061E0h(24.47K) 04127h(16.29K) awardeyt.rom 6. GROUP ROM[ 0] 03F60h(15.84K) 01DDDh(7.47K) _EN_CODE.BIN 7. VGA ROM[1] 0C000h(48.00K) 06C88h(27.13K) SDG_2919.DAT 8. NoCompress ROM 40000h(256.00K) 40028h(256.04K) 040603.dat 9. LOGO BitMap 4B30Ch(300.76K) 02CC6h(11.19K) 865.bmp (SP) NCPUCODE 03000h(12.00K) 03000h(12.00K) NCPUCODE.BIN Total compress code space = 75000h(468.00K) Total compressed code size = 72C08h(459.01K) Remain compress code space = 023F8h(8.99K) ** Micro Code Information ** Update ID CPUID | Update ID CPUID | Update ID CPUID | Update ID CPUID ----------------+-----------------+-----------------+------------------- PGA478 17 0F29 | PGA478 2E 0F12 | PGA478 01 0F21 | PGA478 08 0F23 PGA478 1E 0F24 | PGA478 05 0F13 | PGA478 15 0F25 | PGA478 37 0F27 PGA478 17 0F29 | PGA478 12 0F30 | SLOT1 07 0F32 | SLOT1 0B 0F31 SLOT1 07 0F33 | --> "040603.dat"[NoCompress ROM] contains the string, mentioned above. It is really unusual that a/an "Award", "Phoenix - Award", "Phoenix", "AMIBIOS" contains such a Linux/GXX related string. Furthermore, the module: "040603.dat" itself seems to be already packed/compressed anyhow, because of packing the module with ZIP/ACE/RAR/7ZIP has nearly no effect. Does anybody know, what the sense/task of the module is? -- Telefonieren Sie schon oder sparen Sie noch? NEU: GMX Phone_Flat http://www.gmx.net/de/go/telefonie

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[LinuxBIOS] where do we stand
by Ronald G Minnich Dec. 1, 2005

Dec. 1, 2005

Yh Lu, what is the current state of your patches vis-a-vis the SVN tree? what's missing and/or waiting to be done? thanks ron

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