On Tue, 29 Apr 2008 16:03:22 +0200, Andreas Rudin coreboot@revamp-it.ch wrote:
Hello.
We have 600 PCs with ASUS SP98-N mainboards (supersocket7, 2 sdram slots, usb, vga, sound and lan onboard) here with us, which we want to get running as clients on LTSP (www.ltsp.org) - systems, we provide for social and educational projects in different African countries. To use these mainboards with LTSP it would be a great advantage to be able to boot from the onboard LAN.
This mainboard has a SIS 5598 chip and an onboard Intel 82558 LAN-Chip.
Although you find in the manual of the mainboard in section 4.4.1 "Details of Bios Features Setup", in the boot sequence the options:
LAN,A,C and LAN,C,A
I tried all the available BIOS-versions provided by ASUS, and none of them have this option.
On coreboot.org neither this mainboard nor the SIS 5598 is mentioned.
Is there anyone, who already has some experience with this mainboard or chipset? If not, I'm now searching for someone, who could help me to understand the ASUS Bios in order to be able to eventually change the settings.
The third way would be to integrate the boot image for the Intel 82558 chip, which can be found on etherboot.org to the mainbaord bios. We already have tried this, but there is the problem, that there is not enough empty space for it in the existing bios. This means we have to throw unneeded components out to make place for the etherboot rom. But here again I need help, because we don't understand, where the different parts of the bios are located inside the binary code of the bios.
So any further ideas and help are really appriciated very much :-)
Hello Andreas, I hate to say it but, I don't think coreboot would be the right solution for you. The SIS 5598 is not supported by coreboot and would take some time to develope it. With it being an oolldd chipset it may not be worth it.
On the other hand I have had some recient experiances with Intel LAN's and could probibly offer some help. Etherboot or the Intel Boot Agent are probibly the solutions that would work for you. Most propritary bios's are made up of modules. There are utilities out there that will extract the modules from the bios image. You simpley replace the exsisting network module with one of the two mentioned above, use the utility to put it back into a bios image and flash the bios.
The first thing you need to figure out is what kind of bios it is: AMI, Award, or Phoenix. Hope that helps.