·Intel 440BX AGPset. ·Intel PIIX4e controller. ·National 309 Super I/O chipset.
Guess it's pretty old but I'd still like to try to put a linux bios on it.
How are your hacking skills?
LinuxBIOS V1: Supports the 440BX but it dosen't know anything about SMP or AGP and you would probally need ADLO to make the video bios work. By 309 I'm guessing that the pc87309 superIO? V1 seems to have really basic support for enableing that on boot but the comments say its specific to a particular mainbord. So some work is needed there as well.
LinuxBIOS V2 I have a set of patches vs an old version of V2 that add the framework for 440BX and was enough to make our product come up and say stuff out of the serial port. (pc87351) However I got stopped trying to read the RAM info via the SMbus. For some reason I always got back zeros (or FF's I dont' remember). Unfortunatly that product never made it beyond prototype and so I didn't continue to try and transition from V1 to V2.
If you are interested in working on it I can fixup my patches against the latest SVN tree and submit them. There's a lot of coding work that still needs to be done after that though.
I have somewhat of an interest in this as I have a Dual P3 machine with a 440 chipset on it that can't use newer larger hardrives because the BIOS chokes and I also have some of the prototypes from our product that could be used for something. I just don't have a lot of time to allocate to this. But I could test things in the evenings and weekends.
It would be really nice to have full V2 support for the 440 family. There are tons of old cheap mainboards with these chips on them and would be great for hobbiest or personal type stuff.
-- Richard A. Smith