Dear coreboot community,
I'm trying to use coreboot on my second PC and I think I need your help. I have an ASUS A8V-E Deluxe with coreboot which does work with a single 1GB ECC module, but not with a second identical one. It hangs at jumping from romstage to coreboot_ram (I hope that's correct). It's last words are "Jumping to image", then nothing.
I'm attaching two logs from serial console, one with 1x1GB RAM installed which works, one with 2x1GB which hangs, and also the diff. Looking at the diff I noticed that in the 2x1GB log there are some missing lines between "Copying data from cache to RAM -- switching to use RAM as stack..." and "Clearing initial memory region: Done". What should happen in between seems to be omitted, which doesn't make sense to me, looking at src/cpu/amd/car/post_cache_as_ram.c . With my little experience I can't figure out what's wrong..
Anything I can do to debug? Do you have an idea?
Some notes: - 2x1GB starts up with the vendor BIOS but randomly hangs at booting linux (kernel panic or so) - 1x1GB works with coreboot and vendor BIOS - Replacing those 1GB ECC modules (Corsair/Samsung chips) with 512MB ECC modules (HP/Samsung or MDT/???) leads to the same results (2 modules fail with coreboot; vendor BIOS unknown) - 2x512MB non-ECC works!
Why are only 2 modules with ECC failing to boot, but not 2 non-ECC? I tried commenting out the contents of hw_enable_ecc() in src/northbridge/amd/amdk8/raminit.c but that didn't change anything. memtest86+ even still detected ECC (with only one module).
Apart from that I got a little success story: the VIA K8T890 chipset on this mainboard had a bug in it's first revision, making it incompatible with dual-core CPUs. I was curious if coreboot also had this limitation, so I bought a cheap dual-core Opteron 180 and tested it. Vendor BIOS: one core detected in linux. coreboot: two cores!! I'm not sure if it's stable because I had two hang-ups last weekend, but that was probably because I forgot to put in the GPU fan plug.. :) If anyone knows the details of this chipset bug I'd be very interested. By the way, the RAM issue is the same with a single-core Athlon 64.
Thanks, Michael