On Sat, 2005-12-03 at 13:06 -0600, Richard Smith wrote:
there any point in trying to just get the chipset specs from VIA (it's a KT600 NB and a VT8237 SB), or are there things that need to be done specifically for the motherboard so that the chipset specs are useless
It depends on what MSI did with the board. Most northbridges have GPIO on them. If MSI did something funky with the SM bus it could be hard to figure out how to turn on the RAM. But not impossible. In most cases the motherboard is simply close copy of the reference design from the chipset mfg. So if you can get a copy of the chipset docs and perhaps the reference design from via then you would at least have a place to get started. Most of that involves an NDA though. So then you would need permission to release the code based on the NDA material.
That's good to know. At least I know that there's a possibility, providing that VIA decides to play nice.
by themselves, apart from the flash memory (which isn't supported either)?
You mean that it doesn't have the ability to program the flash on board? Because from a read viewpoint there is no difference. Any flash part that meets the same timing and pinout as the part that's already on the board will work. You just need a programmer to change things.
Well, it would be kind of nice to not have to fork out money on a programmer if I can do it from the host system, though. Maybe I can use MSI's firmware programmer with a LinuxBIOS image?
I'm more than willing to do the porting work myself, but I'd like to know where I could start, and if it's at all possible without the MB specs.
With chipset docs only yes its possible. But the level of effort may be really large. The docs are going to get you most of the way there but there's probably going to be things that aren't documented and you will probably have to boot under the COTS bios and look at how the registers are set.
In the extreme case you would need to run the COTS bios under an emulator to watch the mem read/writes and IOs. Look at your chipset docs and then modify the emulator to appear to be fake hardware and study how to twiddle the registers depending on what values your fake hardware provided. You can't disassemble the COTS bios and figure it out for legal reasons.
Are you sure? I can't remember signing a license for the BIOS code, in which case I should be allowed to read and study it.
If you can't get the chipset docs though its really not worth it. Find a MB that has docs available.
If it turns out that I'd have to pay for a flash programmer, that just might be a better option. On the one hand, I don't want to give up on this just MSI is being evil, but then on the other hand, it isn't nice to be using products from such a company, so that just might be the tipping over the edge.
Thank you very much for the info!
Fredrik Tolf