Re: Fwd: 440BX - Worth the time?

[Richard A. Smith]

On Tue, 7 Jan 2003 19:59:05 -0500, Dennis Veatch wrote:
> I'm thinking about a switch to Linuxbios for this mobo. The status page on
>  the website says unstable but there is no current date of this status. I
>  looked through the archives and must have overlooked any references to this
>  chipset. So would this board be a good candidate? A few notes about it.

Dennis,

Suposedly the 440BX is supposed to work.  Some of the mainboards in
the mainbord directory are 440xx based and people claim they work. 
We have a 440bx based SBC that I tried linuxbios on briefly but I was
never able to get it to turn on the ram properly.

IIRC I could see the SPD read command issued on the bus and then see
the info return but the value read from the data register was zero.

So I'm very interested in any testing that you do.

I've attached the config file I was using for my testing.  There
isn't anything special or specific to our board so this should be
fine for any BX based board.

One thing to look at though would be the DEVFN of the PIIX4 and make
sure its the same as the config file.  Thats where the I2C bridge is
and it needs that address to set up and talk to the RAM SPD.

Also I haven't worked on this in 6-8 months so this config file may
be really out of date.  If for some reason it won't build then thats
why.

We are about to spin a new rev of this board and this version _will_
run linuxbios.  So I'm going to have to fix this at some point in the
near future and I would be happy to have some help.