Is that the canonical way to test whether RAM init works?
The "canonical" way is to attach a memory bus analyser to your board. Failing that, you can run some stress tests (like, boot Linux and do some disk+network load on it, or similar). If everything works, your memory works, eh? :-)
Sure, if I could boot Linux or memtest my problems would be solved. But currently I haven't yet managed to do so. The problem now is, that I don't know whether booting memtest fails because I need to setup more of the mainboard-specific stuff or because my RAM init doesn't work yet.
That's why you should try doing one (tiny) step at a time, and add lots of debugging/tracing statements. Figure out exactly what works and what doesn't :-)
There _are_ differences, but nothing related to the RAM config registers as far as I can see.
I'll have a look at it too, second pair of eyes...
Segher