Hi,
I've got the mobo in a state where it finishes the coreboot, elfboot fetches the linux kernel from SPI flash and I can see the 'earlyprintk' messages generated by that kernel on the serial port. The VGA console is not working, though.
My VGA is a nvidia 8600GT (10de/0402).
Looking at the messages related to the VGA initialization, I notice the following:
-- During coreboot 'Initializing devices', the following is printed:
rom address for PCI: 07:00.0 = f7000000 Incorrect Expansion ROM Header Signature ffff
-- The VGA card is on PCI bus 07 according to coreboot, but on bus 02 according to 'lspci' when booted with proprietary bios.
-- Several memory ranges are different.
lspci: Memory at fa000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16M] coreb: [0x00f6000000 - 0x00f6ffffff] size 0x01000000 gran 0x18 mem
lspci: Memory at e0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M] coreb: [0x00f4000000 - 0x00f5ffffff] size 0x02000000 gran 0x19 mem64
lspci: Memory at f8000000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=32M] coreb: [0x00f4000000 - 0x00f5ffffff] size 0x02000000 gran 0x19 mem64
lspci: I/O ports at 9000 [size=128] coreb: [0x0000001000 - 0x000000107f] size 0x00000080 gran 0x07 io
lspci: [virtual] Expansion ROM at fb000000 [disabled] [size=128K] coreb: [0x00f7000000 - 0x00f701ffff] size 0x00020000 gran 0x11 romem
** This last one is where the signature is wrong
When the kernel switches from the 'earlyprintk' console to the normal console, it sometimes hangs just before and sometimes right after. It reports using a 'dummy colour VGA console' then (probably because there isn't a real one...).
Is the PCI bus number difference an issue here? I think it just means that the K8 HT Host bridge is initialized differently... Shouldn't be a problem(?). The expansion ROM signature ffff seems to me that the reported memory range is NOT where the ROM actually is. How can that be gotten wrong? PCI should be Plug and Play, not? Is the expansion ROM actually used for VGA console?
Please help. I think other users would be interested to see this setup work. Nice addition to the m57sli tutorial.
Ronald.