[LinuxBIOS] help selecting bios savour for EPIA-M

Hi,
Can anyone help me with this?
I hunted google and the lists but cant find a definate answer for this :(

Can someone tell me which RD1-BIOS Savior from ioss.com.tw, I would need to work with the VIA-EPIA-M motherboards?  I dont curently have one of these and it is going to be a week or 2 before i get it :(
Also one other question :) If the M board takes a 1Mb Flash, can I use a 2Mb Flash chip? (or takes a 2Mb and use a 4Mb) will the board accept it? would i be able to access the extra space for, say installing a kernel or other software?

Please note, the last time i used eprom/flash chips was when that was all you had to put OS and software on, and the whole lot had to be run from 32k of EEPROM, with 64k of RAM!!!!! LOL (Those were the days :) )

Thanks for any help, I know i could wait to get the board itself, and then order the RD1, but thats going to take quite a while :)

Also if anyone can recomend a supplier for the RD1 in the UK, that would be great

Thanks again for any help

Matt

[Jonathan McDowell]

On Sun, Jun 18, 2006 at 10:47:20PM +0100, [e-mail] wrote:
> Can anyone help me with this?
>
> I hunted google and the lists but cant find a definate answer for this
> :(
>
> Can someone tell me which RD1-BIOS Savior from ioss.com.tw, I would
> need to work with the VIA-EPIA-M motherboards?  I dont curently have
> one of these and it is going to be a week or 2 before i get it :(

I am using an RD1-PL with my EPIA-M (the original BIOS chip is an SST
39SF020A).
> Also one other question :) If the M board takes a 1Mb Flash, can I use
> a 2Mb Flash chip? (or takes a 2Mb and use a 4Mb) will the board accept
> it? would i be able to access the extra space for, say installing a
> kernel or other software?

I believe this depends on the board; you need the extra address line(s)
brought out to the socket for it to work. I haven't tried it myself. The
EPIA-M is a 2M (ie 256Kbyte) part.
> Also if anyone can recomend a supplier for the RD1 in the UK, that
> would be great

I'm in the UK and couldn't find a supplier easily when I looked; I
ordered from http://www.eksitdata.com/

J.

[Peter Stuge]

On Mon, Jun 19, 2006 at 08:58:42AM +0100, Jonathan McDowell wrote:
> > Also one other question :) If the M board takes a 1Mb Flash, can I use
> > a 2Mb Flash chip? (or takes a 2Mb and use a 4Mb) will the board accept
> > it? would i be able to access the extra space for, say installing a
> > kernel or other software?
>
> I believe this depends on the board; you need the extra address line(s)
> brought out to the socket for it to work. I haven't tried it myself. The
> EPIA-M is a 2M (ie 256Kbyte) part.

If the part is connected via an LPC bus no more lines are needed, but
then it's up to the address decoder in the southbridge. I don't know
if they typically only decode limited ranges to the LPC bus.

//Peter

[Richard Smith]

On 6/19/06, Peter Stuge  wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 19, 2006 at 08:58:42AM +0100, Jonathan McDowell wrote:
> > > Also one other question :) If the M board takes a 1Mb Flash, can I use
> > > a 2Mb Flash chip? (or takes a 2Mb and use a 4Mb) will the board accept
> > > it? would i be able to access the extra space for, say installing a
> > > kernel or other software?
> >
> > I believe this depends on the board; you need the extra address line(s)
> > brought out to the socket for it to work. I haven't tried it myself. The
> > EPIA-M is a 2M (ie 256Kbyte) part.
>
> If the part is connected via an LPC bus no more lines are needed, but
> then it's up to the address decoder in the southbridge. I don't know
> if they typically only decode limited ranges to the LPC bus.

If you duplicate the image in the larger part then it should work either way.

So if you are using a 2M chip and your orginal was only 1M then take
your 1M image cat it onto itself and use that in your 2M part.  Then
it dosen't matter what the upper address line does.  The code fetched
will be the same.

[Bari Ari]

Depends on the chipset. I've had parts that theoretically could access 
beyond 256k Bytes of range but had all kinds of hoops to jump through in 
register settings to decode beyond that.
-Bari

Peter Stuge wrote:
> If the part is connected via an LPC bus no more lines are needed, but
> then it's up to the address decoder in the southbridge. I don't know
> if they typically only decode limited ranges to the LPC bus.

[Ronald G Minnich]

Bari Ari wrote:
> Depends on the chipset. I've had parts that theoretically could access 
> beyond 256k Bytes of range but had all kinds of hoops to jump through in 
> register settings to decode beyond that.

all the new chipset, however, seem to have enough of the right bits to 
get to at least 16 mbits -- 2 mybtes.

ron