Ok, little status update...
On Sunday 18 December 2011 23:03:50 Christian Ruppert wrote:
Hi guys,
I currently try to get coreboot working on my "Asus M4A78LT-M". Using the M4A785T-M [1] as template works fine so far as the hardware is almost equal but there are a few issues:
a) My RAM sticks [2] (tried both separate) doesn't work (see serial-ram- fail.txt). It is present but not valid, it seems the CRC check fails in src/northbridge/amd/amdmct/mct_ddr3/mct_d.c and I have no idea why...
My other RAM sticks [3] (only one tested) seem to work (see serial-ram- works.txt)
Do you guys have any ideas why the other sticks do not work?
b) Neither the NVIDIA (ZOTAC GeForce 210 Synergy Edition 512MB) PCIe card nor the on-board ATI Radeon HD 3000 works. I tried to extract the VGA bios of the on-board card by using the bios_extract script mentioned at [4] as well as Peter's shell command mentioned at [5]. bios_extract doesn't seem to find the VGA bios, at least the PCI IDs doesn't match. I get amipci_1002_4392.rom, amipci_1002_FFF1.rom and amipci_1002_FFF2.rom but the PCI ID of the on-board ATI card is: 1002:9616. So I tried Peter's command and that seems to work at least partially. I do get some strange stuff on the screen incl. a flashing cursor but that's it...
So I'd like to know how to get the PCIe card working at least (which is totally enough for me or resp. exactly what I want). The on-board one would be only interesting for my Wiki article, so for others.
Now (thank GRUB2) that I am able to boot with coreboot/SeaBIOS I noticed that the NVIDIA PCIe card is *not* listed by lspci at all. The onboard card is listed.
c) Not sure if I just misunderstood something.. I have GRUB 1 / legacy installed on my disk and SeaBIOS tries to load GRUB but then it freezes. From what I've read only GRUB 2 is supported as *payload*. Does it also apply to GRUB on a disk?
So #c has been solved. Booting with GRUB2 works fine. :)
d) Using the microcode update stuff results into some strange boot issues (see serial-microcode_fail.txt, note the "rscp7u80S_eetAaMrDlyM_SsRe tup()") and freezes. Is it a known issue? Any workarounds? Even "Juhe" (the author of the M4A785T-M [1] article mentioned that.. In my case it is a AMD Athlon II X2 245e.
So as you can see in serial-ram-works.txt it's almost working. I guess it'll boot "fine" if you guys are able to help me with the issues above. If you (like me) prefer IRC then just poke me (idl0r) and I'll post any successfully results either here or on the Wiki article later.
[1] http://www.coreboot.org/ASUS_M4A785T-M [2] http://www.gskill.com/products.php?index=223 [3] http://www.gskill.com/products.php?index=243 [4] http://www.coreboot.org/VGA_support#RECOMMENDED:_Extracting_from_your_vendor _bios_image [5] http://www.coreboot.org/VGA_support#Extracting_from_the_system_.28if_everyth ing_else_fails.29
Unfortunately there are other issues that I noticed during the first boot.
e) The processor P-States are somewhat incomplete. vendor BIOS: # dmesg|grep power [ 1.901172] powernow-k8: Found 1 AMD Athlon(tm) II X2 245e Processor (2 cpu cores) (version 2.20.00) [ 1.911453] powernow-k8: 0 : pstate 0 (2900 MHz) [ 1.917517] powernow-k8: 1 : pstate 1 (2100 MHz) [ 1.923502] powernow-k8: 2 : pstate 2 (1500 MHz) [ 1.929473] powernow-k8: 3 : pstate 3 (800 MHz)
coreboot: # grep powernow dmesg.coreboot [ 1.846464] powernow-k8: Found 1 AMD Athlon(tm) II X2 245e Processor (2 cpu cores) (version 2.20.00) [ 1.855605] powernow-k8: 0 : pstate 0 (2900 MHz) [ 1.860482] powernow-k8: 1 : pstate 1 (2100 MHz)
f) As mentioned by "Juhe" the snd-hda-intel module crashes thus a kernel panic... See attachment snd-hda-intel-panic.txt.
I also attached the dmesg and dmidecode output of the first *sucessfull* boot.