August 2007 - coreboot - mail.coreboot.org

[LinuxBIOS] acpitool
by Jordan Crouse Aug. 7, 2007

Aug. 7, 2007

Here is something that will probably be of interest to LinuxBIOS - this could make the effort of porting that much easier: http://kernelslacker.livejournal.com/88243.html Jordan -- Jordan Crouse Systems Software Development Engineer Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.

2 1

[LinuxBIOS] would sending you hardware help any?
by Nuklear Zelph Aug. 7, 2007

Aug. 7, 2007

i have a toshiba portege laptop that has no screen and i can't really use it, but it does work. i also have some other desktop mainboards that are pretty old if any of that may help.

2 1

[LinuxBIOS] uvesafb, framebuffer by emulation
by Peter Stuge Aug. 6, 2007

Aug. 6, 2007

http://dev.gentoo.org/~spock/projects/uvesafb/

3 2

[LinuxBIOS] Alix boards
by Luis Correia Aug. 6, 2007

Aug. 6, 2007

Hi, is there anyone working on LinuxBIOS for this board? http://pcengines.ch/alix1b.htm Thanks, Luis Correia

3 4

[LinuxBIOS] PC protection
by frederic＠placenet.org Aug. 6, 2007

Aug. 6, 2007

is it possible to put in linuxbios an option that protect your pc to be stolen. for example: ping one time an wan ip adress when ethernet interface if up ? is this idea is possible ? bst regards. Frederic

4 5

[LinuxBIOS] No keyboard.
by Feng, Libo Aug. 6, 2007

Aug. 6, 2007

Hi, all, Today, I almost finish LinuxBIOS on Tyan s3992. A text-mode RedHat is booted, and a "Hello, World" is written and run. Thank a lot of people here. The mistake I made is building LinuxBIOS on a FC machine and testing it on another RH machine, many machine check panics arose. The one thing left is that keyboard is not enabled in Linux. It seems it is not correctly configured in LinuxBIOS. I have to use a serial port and terminal to access the machine. Where the keyboard is enabled in LinuxBIOS? And maybe easier, Linux has some kind of application like Windows to configure keyboard or not? Best Regards 丰立波 Feng Libo @ AMD Ext: 20906 Mobile Phone: 13683249071 Office Phone: 0086-010-62801406

4 7

[LinuxBIOS] [PATCH] [ADLO] Booting Windows XP and Windows 2000
by Augusto Pedroza Aug. 6, 2007

Aug. 6, 2007

We finally got windows XP to work with LinuxBIOS. Since it is working fine on qemu I hope more people can test it and understand it. Just few modifications to ADLO were necessary. see wiki for details: http://www.linuxbios.org/Booting_Windows_using_LinuxBIOS -- Augusto Pedroza

4 9

[LinuxBIOS] GSoC status report: lbmenu
by Uwe Hermann Aug. 5, 2007

Aug. 5, 2007

Hi all, here's my (first) status report for the lbmenu project I'm working on as part of the Google Summer of Code. I should have done this a lot earlier, sorry for the delay. What is lbmenu? --------------- lbmenu is a simple payload which provides a LinuxBIOS config menu, which allows you to change some config options at "runtime", i.e. after LinuxBIOS did the hardware init, but before any bootloader or OS is started. Planned features, design goals (mostly copied from my GSoC proposal) -------------------------------------------------------------------- - Text-mode (Kconfig-like) console UI for changing LinuxBIOS settings. - Bootsplash screen (text mode only for now) where the user can press a certain (configurable) key to enter the configuration tool. - The tool should also be accessible over serial console (for headless clients, servers or debugging scenarios), as well as (if feasible) over telnet or ssh (given a big enough ROM chip and Linux + busybox in ROM). - The tool should work both in ROM (as part of LinuxBIOS), and as a standalone application on a Linux system. The GUI should be the same (or similar) in both cases. The standalone version might enable some options which cannot be used in the embedded version because of size constraints. To investigate: Implement the standalone tool as a frontend of lxbios? Or include the lxbios code in the standalone tool? - The tool needs to fit into flash ROM (together with LinuxBIOS and at least one LinuxBIOS payload), so size is important. Typical sizes of flash ROM chips today range from 256 KB to 2 MB. - It should be reasonably easy to extend the tool. For example, it should be possible to (later) add a graphical user-interface on top of the generic, UI-independent code of this tool. A graphical user-interface is _not_ part of this GSoC project, though! - "BIOS password" feature for setting a LinuxBIOS password. Without the correct password, no payload should be executed/booted. Random possible ideas for after GSoC ------------------------------------ - Internationalization support (using gettext or something similar). The strings in the UI should be fully translatable into other languages. Changing the language at run-time would require the strings of all supported languages to be placed into ROM (size constraints), so this will probably be a compile-time option only. - Configurable UI-Themes (colors, layouts, key mappings, text-based or (later) graphical splash screens etc.) - Payload selection mechanism to choose at runtime which payload to boot (if multiple payloads are included in the ROM chip). This would make it theoretically possible to choose between GRUB2, EFI, Open Firmware and other payloads upon each system boot. It's not yet clear if this should be done in lbmenu, or as a mechanism in LinuxBIOS itself, or maybe as part of lbgrub2. - LinuxBIOS Device Tree browser which shows the device tree for this mainboard (maybe even allows changes?). Implementation plan/notes ------------------------- - Written in C code (minimal assembly code, if required). - The code will be documented using Doxygen-style code comments. - A manpage will explain the usage and parameters of the tool. Optionally, there will be some help texts in the tool (configurable, as that increases the size of the tool). - Ideally, the building of the tool will be integrated in the normal LinuxBIOSv3 build process, with hooks for adapting some defaults or settings of the tool at compile-time. - QEMU will be used for testing the implementation. - License: GPL, version 2 or later. Status ------ - I have written a minimalist ncurses-implementation called tinycurses, which allows some basic primitives such as printing characters on screen, moving the cursor, reading keys from keyboard, beeping etc. It (sort of) supports both, VGA text console, and serial; more work is needed, though. This is designed as a general purpose payload library, which can also be used by other payloads which need console text support, serial output, keyboard services, beep() etc. - The alternative would be to use the stock ncurses, but there are various problems: - Too big; tinycurses is stripped down to just provide the most important functions and features (e.g. no wide character support). - Requires syscalls, term library, and generally an OS. I _do_ have a first test version which is compiled/linked against newlib (http://sourceware.org/newlib/) a small libc implementation which has stubs for OS-less builds (which we need in LinuxBIOS + payloads). However, making this really fully work will require a lot more work. Also, the smallest lbmenu payload size when using newlib I've been able to get so far, is 130 KB or so (which is quite a lot). My plan is to be able to use lbmenu with 256K ROM chips, and you need to put LinuxBIOS (30-70 KB) in there, as well as at least one payload (say FILO, ~60-80 KB), and lbmenu. So size is very important. On the long term the lbmenu implementation should probably rely on the tinycurses implementation for that reason (which is currently smaller than 10 KB or so, and doesn't require newlib). - The final goal of all of this would be to use plain Kconfig _within_ lbmenu (at runtime) to display lbmenu's options and let the user change them. Thus ncurses or tinycurses needs to be complete enough to be able to compile kconfig. If this is absolutely not feasible, well, I'll have to implement a small menu system from scratch, but I hope that won't be necessary. - The compile-time options of lbmenu are configured via kconfig, just like the options of LinuxBIOSv3 itself. - So far my draft implementation of lbmenu can be booted, prints a text banner (VGA and/or serial), can react on a (configurable) keypress, e.g. ESC, then enter a "menu" (which is a stub right now), and reboot upon another ESC keypress. TODO ---- - Finish tinycurses and/or ncurses+newlib so they're usable with kconfig. - Figure out a mechanism to select between various payloads included in the ROM (_if_ this will be done in lbmenu, discussions welcome). - Implement read/write of CMOS values. - The configuration menu within lbmenu will be "dynamically" generated (or that's my plan at least) from Kconfig.lbmenu files in the LinuxBIOSv3 tree. The same parser which is used in Kconfig should parse all *.lbmenu files and construct the lbmenu main menu from that. So you can have southbridge/amd/cs5536/Kconfig.lbmenu which provides lbmenu menu items which are CS5536-specific (e.g. enable/disable IDE). Another mainboard/amd/norwich/Kconfig.lbmenu would provide mainboard- specific menu items etc. etc. - Probably a few other things I cannot think of right now. No code yet, sorry, but I'll try to put together a small demo soon which I can post here. I intend to put tinycurses into the global util/ directory, as it's independant of LinuxBIOS and generally usable for other payloads. Same for lbmenu, it should be in util/ and gets its tinycurses implementation via svn:externals (as should all other payloads which use it)... Any comments and suggestions welcome! Uwe. -- http://www.hermann-uwe.de | http://www.holsham-traders.de http://www.crazy-hacks.org | http://www.unmaintained-free-software.org

4 3

[LinuxBIOS] flashrom statically linked on linux - is this intentional?
by Peter Lemenkov Aug. 5, 2007

Aug. 5, 2007

Hello All! Subj. I have no clue why should I build it statically. Maybe some reasons does exists? -- With best regards!

3 3

[LinuxBIOS] Kernel does nothing
by Eyal Cohen Aug. 5, 2007

Aug. 5, 2007

Hello. I have a GX1+CS5530A+PC97317 board that I would like LinuxBIOS to work (properly) on. I have managed to compile LinuxBIOSv2 for this configuration using FILO as payload and burned the bios flash with it. To my relief it began outputting data to the serial port so it seemed like everything was working. It said it found ram and the hardware and all was fine. After seeing that I have connected a hard drive and tried to boot a kernel. FILO said it finds the file and seemed to load it to memory,but... Once FILO jumped to the kernel no more output was transmitted nor to the com port nor the screen. I have also patched this kernel with a patch by Juergen Beisert <juergen(a)kreuzholzen.de> to add support for the CS5530's IRQ router. The kernel I have used has build in support for standard UART, and from using another (same kind) board with this kernel I can guarantee the COM port works. What is wrong? Why doesn't the kernel boot? Attached is the output log from the COM port. Thank you very much EyalC

3 7