On Fri, May 14, 2010 at 1:49 PM, Joe Korty joe.korty@ccur.com wrote:
Some background: The reason I'm looking at coreboot is that standard BIOSes (apparently) run out of memory while doing the bus walk, when I plug a PCI-e expansion chassis into the motherboard and populate it. The BIOS will either lock up or the OS will boot but what the OS sees for a PCI Bus (via lspci -tv) is clearly corrupt.
So my job was/is to do an experiment to see if our problems are indeed due to out-of-memory issues in standard BIOSes, and if so, if coreboot could be a useful way around this issue.
And indeed, the first time I booted coreboot with a populated PCI-e chassis attached, I got an out-of-memory halt from coreboot. Increasing CONFIG_HEAP_SIZE to 0x10000 (ie, 4x) got the system to boot, and lspci -tv looks good also. I have yet to try intermediate values.
Could you try the latest? Devices now take ~ 1/4 the space that they used to take.
Unfortunately we have an even bigger PCI-e loaded expansion chassis (configuration #2), for which coreboot also hangs. It's not an out-of-memory hang; it happens (apparently) during the bus walk. I haven't looked into this hang in detail yet, so I don't have much to report. But I do fear it may be something more fundamental.
If you send the log to the list we might be able to help.
Thanks, Myles