Hi all,
I started working on this problem this week and there are some strange things I have found so far. First, the behaviour I noticed when starting flashrom after booting whith LB : 1) flashrom needs to be given the board type in command line parameter (-m gigabyte:m57sli) otherwise it is unable to recognize this board. On the other hand it seems to correctly recognize the SB type (mcp55) and the SIO too (it8716). It seems that it succeeds in reading and writting the configuration registers of the SIO (those accesible through the 0x2e - 0x2f pair of IO ports) at least.. 2) the real problem is that it hangs when trying to access the SPI interface of the SIO, more precisely when pooling the "busy flag" of the configuration register of the SPI interface before sending a SPI command, normally mapped at the 0x820 IO address. Indeed when dumping the value which is read @ this address, one get a value 0xff! It doesn't seem to me that this register should have normally this value, there seem to be a problem with the decoding of this IO address range into the mcp55 SB very probably.. 3) the most strange thing is that when probing with an oscilloscope the SPI signals, there _IS_ indeed a burst of activity on the CLK line when executing flashrom. Some code into flashrom seems to generate this activity, but I haven't found so far where it is triggerd. But from the flashrom point of view there is no reponse from the spi interface so it hangs..
Rudolf Marek suggested after an irc discussion that there could be problems with the GPIO configuration, but I don't think so, because if that would be the case then we couldn't access the SIO at all and the platform wouldn't boot at all with LB. But who knows? Rudolf, can you be more specific about this GPIO hypothesis?.. For my part I continue to think that there is a problem with the IO address decoding into the PCI->LPC bridge in mcp55.. Yinghai, can you help please?
Regards, Florentin