* Corey Osgood corey.osgood@gmail.com [070616 05:31]:
Also, the tyan s2875 has the same superio as yours, and doesn't do any special setup for it at all, just w83627hf_enable_serial.
That's an opteron board. Sure it behaves differently than a system with an intel southbridge.
The effect I see here, too, is that the 855/ich4 systems have some kind of EC which takes control before the first instruction is executed.
Also, there is no output on the serial console, even though the SuperIO driver is known to work fine on other mainboards. So it definitely is a board/southbridge specific issue.
Some distros (*cough* ubuntu *cough*) don't allow you to do anything under 0x100 though, but iirc arch and debian do it fine.
Their kernels block IO accesses? Weird. Why?