Hi all,
Finaly a little victory with the SPI version of the GA-M57SLI-S4 board.. It works!!! LinuxBIOS + FILO as payload work (almost) "out of the box" on the spi revision of the card, i.e. I didn't make any changes to the source tree used to generate the rom image. But some issues remain: -1) no support in flashrom for spi chips. I used a home made spi programmer (with a Altera FPGA) to flash the rom image. I "socketised" also the flash chip and the mainboard. -2) I managed to boot a Linux with LB (a pretty old Debian distro with a 2.4 kernel). No VGA display at all! I had to use a serial console to display the LB logs and then to log in into Linux. BTW my graphics adapter was a old PCI graphics card. -3) I tried to install a network card too (PCI also). When booting with the factory bios image (Award) it works well, lspci shows both the graphics adapter and the ethernet one. But when booting with LB, these 2 items don't appear anymore into the lspci scan.. It looks to me that the PCI bridge is not correctly initialized into the SB : am I wrong or not on this issue?
That's the first assessement I can make for my work with this motherboard for the moment. Now I will try to add support for SPI flash and ITE8716 superio in flashrom (I have never done that before, it will be hard for me!..). Btw, is someone else working with this board at this moment or am I alone?.. I would like to avoid to do unusefull work..
Finaly another finding I made: - the board comes with a 512 KiB flash chip. I tried to use a 1 MiB flash chip and it works! But I had to duplicate the linuxbios.rom image (cat lb.rom lb.rom
lb2.rom) to generate a bigger image suitable for this bigger flash.
That's all folks.. Florentin