Hi,
I was hoping to use the board above to experiment with Coreboot. The board has the same northbridge as the Asus M2V-MX SE (VIA K8M890) and the same southbridge as the Asus M2V (VIA 8237A). Both of those chipsets are fully supported. Thinking that maybe I can at least get the board to boot ASAP, I built Coreboot for the Asus M2V board to get the southbridge functionality. I also didn't use the M2V-MX SE profile because it has the SPI chip, while the M2V-MX board has a PLCC-32 chip.
OK
The board booted fine, except I have no video, serial port or ability to write to the BIOS chip.
No video -> you need to include the extracted VGA bios from original BIOS. No serial port looks like wrong superio setup. No ability to write to the chip sounds interesting ? What do you mean by that. Flashrom cannot no-long overwrite the chip content? Maybe just some GPIO needs to be raised. Do you have more PLCC chips or other boards so you can hotswap them?
I know the board booted fine because I was able to SSH into the box using a PCI network card. Considering that both the M2V and M2V-MX have the same southbridge chip, I don't understand why there was not serial port or write access to the BIOS chip. Can someone shed some light on that for me, please.
Yep see above. I would suggest to run the superiotool (see utils dir) and check what kind of superio is really there. Or even better provide ./superiotool -d dump best with original bios running if possible.
Then you just need to change few lines and you should get serial back. I can even help with that but we need to know not only the chip there but also how the chip is configured.
For the VGA you need to use bios_extract and extract the VGA bios from orig bios image and tell coreboot via menu to include that (you need just pci ID lspci -n will tell)
My other problem is I would like to create a build profile for the M2V-MX using the code from the M2V for the southbridge and the code from the M2V-MX SE for the northbridge. Is that a good idea or would I have to do some other things? I learned C programming in 1993 and used it only until 1998; I am a little rusty.
Well C is simple you will got it back soon.
My ability to make sense of low-level chipset stuff is also very narrow.
If you ask good questions you will get answers.
However, I am a fast learner and I am desperate to get something accomplished for a homebrew thin client project that I have spent way too much time working on.
My goal is to extend the life of boards that people send in for recycling by turning them into more reliable diskless information terminals.
A nice coreboot use!
Thanks Rudolf