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Windows-based terminals - what can be done?
by Thomas Fritz 24 Sep '03

24 Sep '03

I have access to a few WBTs at a surplus place, and I've dug up the specs on them: Cyrix Pentium clone - 266MHz up to 128MB SDRAM ports: PS/2 keyb/mouse, 2 USB 1.1, 2 serial, 1 parallel, 10/100 ethernet, and sound in/out the chipset(s) include a SuperIO 97317, and a CS5530 (which handles the soundblaster compatible sound and presumably the video). The board has an Award BIOS little square-like ROM, and a larger 8MB ROM which holds Windows CE. There are also various places on the board which could have had various optional features, but there is no IDE, floppy, etc...but I think if I solder on a PCI slot where it belongs I could hack some more funtionality onto it for testing. I've been thinking of how to go about hacking this thing, and the easiest method I'd like to try first: Burning a new ROM to replace the Windows CE version. I doubt this thing would be easy to flash the BIOS, if it even had that capability. I'm not looking for graphics, a text screen will be more than sufficient. On this, I have two questions: What's my chances for success (educated guesses?), and has anyone done something similar?

3 2

EPIA-M serial port information
by Dave Ashley 24 Sep '03

24 Sep '03

Based on some emails from Andrew I started poking around into the epia-m serial port problem. Here are my observations: The 9 pin internal serial port is part of the VT1211 chip, not the VT8235, or other chips with serial ports. Under linux all baud rates are 1/2 what they should be. So if I pick 115200, I get 57600. If I pick 19200, I get 9600, etc. I can fix linux with setserial /dev/ttyS0 baud_base 57600 Then the actual baud rate matches what I expect. 38400 and 115200 cannot be achieved though. Andrew says if he boots with Award and the warm boots into linuxbios, the serial port is 115200. On the epia-m motherboard near the VT1211 chip is a crystal oscillator labeled KTS24.5X1K, which suggests it is 24.5 mhz. The VT1211 spec calls for a 48 mhz clock. Don't know if this is the cause of the problem, VT1211 being driven by 1/2 speed clock. My guess is there is some register in the VT1211 that has to be tweaked to specify the serial port clock divisor. linuxbios doesn't touch this at all. award bios sets it to match the 24.5 mhz crystal. On cold startup the vt1211 defaults to assuming 48 mhz input clock. This explains all observations, but doesn't solve the problem... I just put a scope on pin 17 of the vt1211, it appears to be 48 mhz though so that blows that theory.

2 1

about util/vgabios
by elife elife 23 Sep '03

23 Sep '03

Hi, I am trying util/vgabios but encounter a strange problem: testbios seems fetching wrong instruction [root@linux vgabios]# ./testbios -s 64k -t ~/lb/500video.bios.bin running file /root/lb/500video.bios.bin No base specified. defaulting to 0xc0000 No initial code segment specified. defaulting to 0xc000 No initial instruction pointer specified. defaulting to 0x0003 Switching to single step mode. AX=00ff BX=0000 CX=0000 DX=0080 SP=fff8 BP=0000 SI=0000 DI=0000 DS=0040 ES=0000 SS=0030 CS=c000 IP=0005 NV UP DI PL NZ NA PO NC c000:0003 eb53 JMP 58 c000:3 - AX=00ff BX=0000 CX=0000 DX=0080 SP=fff8 BP=0000 SI=0000 DI=0000 DS=0040 ES=0000 SS=0030 CS=c000 IP=005a NV UP DI PL NZ NA PO NC c000:0058 0000 ADD [BX+SI],AL c000:58 - [root@linux lb]# od -x 500vi* |more 0000000 aa55 eb60 3753 3034 3030 c237 2a8a 522a 0000020 5345 5245 4556 2044 00b1 4f46 2052 4249 0000040 204d 4f43 504d 5441 4249 4c49 5449 2a59 0000060 2a2a a807 0000 1090 3130 302f 2f37 3032 0000100 3230 0000 2e31 3431 3c20 4144 203e 2020 0000120 3156 2033 2020 2020 83e9 075e 6f43 7970 testbios said c000:0058 is 0000 but in file, it's E9835E JMP 5EDE Best Regards! _________________________________________________________________ 与联机的朋友进行交流，请使用 MSN Messenger: http://messenger.msn.com/cn

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the EPIA universe
by ron minnich 23 Sep '03

23 Sep '03

I find myself getting confused about all the EPIA boards and their configurations. Can someone help fill this in? name CPU Extension Speed RAM EPIA-M C3 3DNOW 800 Mhz SDRAM That's all I know :-) ron

11 17

unsupported int on Epia800
by Nathanael Noblet 23 Sep '03

23 Sep '03

Hello, I'm still not sure what is causing it yet. I know it happens when I seem to turn on my epia board after it being off for awhile, while looking only at the screen and not the serial console. I get these message biosint: Unsupported int #0xff ... register settings... ... register settings... biosint: Unsupported int #0xfc ... register settings... ... register settings... biosint: Unsupported int #0xcd ... register settings... ... register settings... once I go back to look at the serial output because nothing is coming on screen. If I am viewing the output on serial, and turn it off then back on. This works. I always have linux shutdown cleanly and then power off. So I'm not sure what it is. I'm looking through that link posted earlier about BIOS Ints but haven't found these ones yet. Earlier when I was first getting this to work with my board I had had messages like these, only different ones I wrote them down biosint: Unsupported int #0xf7 ... register settings... ... register settings... biosint: Unsupported int #0xfc ... register settings... ... register settings... biosint: Unsupported int #0xc4 ... register settings... ... register settings... Ideas? -- Nathanael Noblet Gnat Solutions 4604 Monterey Ave NW Calgary, AB T3B 5K4 T/F 403.288.5360 C 403.809.5368 http://www.gnat.ca/

2 1

Re: the EPIA universe
by Michael Fenner 23 Sep '03

23 Sep '03

> Date: Tue, 23 Sep 2003 23:54:10 +0800 > From: Andrew Ip <aip(a)cwlinux.com> > To: ron minnich <rminnich(a)lanl.gov> > Cc: Niki Waibel <niki.waibel(a)newlogic.com>, linuxbios(a)clustermatic.org > Subject: Re: the EPIA universe > > Hi, > > > name CPU Extension Speed RAM remarks > > EPIA-M C3 3DNOW 800 Mhz SDRAM > > EPIA-M C3 3DNOW 600 MHz SDRAM fanless > I think all EPIA-M uses ddr, and EPIA/EPIA-V uses sdram. Also, > any CPU less or equal to 600MHz doesn't come with fan. Furthermore, > EPIA-M comes with MPEG-2 decoder. VIA has released source code for > mpeg-2 is and also X driver recently. If you want to try mpeg-2 decoder, > the easiest way is to use mplayer which just has got it supported. > AFAIK, EPIA-M 10000 is able to play mpeg-2 even without using the hw > decoder. > > -Andrew > Hi Andrew, where did you get the information that mplayer now supports the mpeg-2 decoder for the epia-m? Couldn't find it anywhere..... Also I'm a little confused about the source for the mpeg-2 decoder - I just know that they support a precompiled version of xine (called VeXP) for some Linux distributions and the source of the lite version of the CLE266 drivers (without hw-mpeg2). Did I miss some good news here? thnax, Michael

2 1

w49f002u.c ?
by Damien Charlet 22 Sep '03

22 Sep '03

First, Thank you for your answers. Unfortunately I tried again and again today and I can't properly flash my winbond chip. I even tried to nice -19 flash_rom, remove the print's but it doesn't help. I dumped several time the content burned, and there are each time several errors, not twice the same, randomly placed across the chip. The wrong bytes are often burned as FF, but this is not always the case. What else could I try ? Where should I dig into ? Thx Damien -- Damien(.)Charlet(AT pu-pm.univ-fcomte.fr) Doctorant UIN:78754463 Laboratoire d'Informatique de l'Universite de Franche-Comte FRE CNRS 2661 - Centre de Developement du Multimedia de Montbeliard Tel: +33-(0)3.81.99.47.76 damien.charlet(a)pu-pm.univ-fcomte.fr

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Re: epia800 direct vga working
by Nathanael D. Noblet 22 Sep '03

22 Sep '03

Hello, So I've got the epia800 working with the original BIOS that was extracted from the original BIOS. I've been looking over the code that was submitted, and as well as the difference between register settings on boot with regular BIOS settings and LinuxBIOS settings. I have been trying to get DirectFB to work with the epiafb module. It works when I boot with regular bios, but not the LinuxBIOS version. Here are the differences between the two. ORIGINAL 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Trident Microsystems CyberBlade/i1 (rev 6a) 00: 23 10 00 85 07 00 b0 02 6a 00 00 03 00 20 00 00 10: 00 00 80 e1 00 00 00 e2 00 00 00 e1 00 00 00 00 20: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 23 10 00 85 30: 00 00 00 00 80 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 0b 01 00 00 LINUXBIOS with extracted VGABIOS 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Trident Microsystems CyberBlade/i1 (rev 6a) 00: 23 10 00 85 03 00 b0 02 6a 00 00 03 00 40 00 00 10: 00 00 80 fd 00 00 80 fe 00 00 00 fe 00 00 00 00 20: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 23 10 00 85 30: 00 00 00 00 80 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 01 00 00 I remember working on a sis530 board that had to set particular registers, I'm wondering if someone can give me a little tutorial on how to read these values and turn them into a corresponding register address so that I can play around with the settings to get it all working. Once I have that all working like the original bios I guess the direct vga changes could incorporate the changes and we would not need the VGABIOS if I am not mistaken? I'd like to help, but need to know how to go about reading the above in a better way then I know right now... -- Nathanael D. Noblet <nathanael(a)gnat.ca> Gnat Solutions

2 1

linuxbios on epia-m -- not starting
by Niki Waibel 22 Sep '03

22 Sep '03

linuxbios does not start ... i can see: === LinuxBIOS-1.0.0 Mon Sep 22 02:17:36 CEST 2003 starting... Copying LinuxBIOS to ram. Jumping to LinuxBIOS. === that's it. first i tought it is a mem problem (512MB Infineon CL2). i changed 0x350 to 0x150 in src/northbridge/via/vt8623/raminit.inc and i've activated ../freebios/src/ram/ramtest.inc in ../freebios/src/mainboard/via/epia-m/Config. it seems that everything is ok: === LinuxBIOS-1.0.0 Mon Sep 22 12:38:53 CEST 2003 starting... Testing SDRAM : 00000000-0009ffff SDRAM fill: 0009ffff SDRAM verify: 0009ffff Done. Copying LinuxBIOS to ram. Jumping to LinuxBIOS. === so i tried to figure out where the stop occurs. i verified if the code is copied correctly: === LinuxBIOS-1.0.0 Mon Sep 22 02:17:36 CEST 2003 starting... Copying LinuxBIOS to ram. NIKI: Jumping to LinuxBIOS. src: 000f0b70 dst: 00004000 size: 0000aa8c src_code: 010f2efa00405215 dst_code: 010f2efa00405215 === -> fine. unfort i dont know much about x86 asm... but it seems that the problem is somewhere in c_start.s ... if i put movl $0xfffe0000, %edi jmp *%edi to the top of the _start: function then linuxbios loops. (i just wanted to check if the copied code is executed...) is that a better way to find out what's wrong? by the way: === gcc -x assembler-with-cpp -DASSEMBLY -E ... crt0.S > crt0.s gcc ... -o crt0.o crt0.s crt0.S: Assembler messages: crt0.S:163: Warning: indirect jmp without `*' === instead of: leal _iseg, %edi jmp %edi shouldn't it be: leal _iseg, %edi jmp *%edi ? niki w. waibel

3 7

/dev/nvram useable?
by Hubert Denkmair 22 Sep '03

22 Sep '03

Hello again, does anyone know if/how the linux /dev/nvram device is working with linuxbios and my Epia5000? I would love to store some status information of my car mp3 player in the nvram, since power supply can be cut any time and I want my harddisk to be mounted readonly. On linuxbios startup, the following two lines are printed: >RTC Init >Invalid CMOS LB checksum And after every linuxbios boot, when switching back to the original BIOS, it complains "CMOS checksum error, defaults loaded..." Writing to /dev/nvram raises no error (echo "hello" > /dev/nvram), but reading from /dev/nvram results in "reading `/dev/nvram': Input/output error" :( (How) can I use the nvram? Is there another possibility, maybe without the /dev/nvram device driver? Hubert

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