[LinuxBIOS] Via epia-m2 difficulties

[Kurt André Selbach]

Hi!

I'm trying to get a working linuxbios on my Via epia m2 12000,
with 1200mhz processor and 512mb ram.

The goal is to boot linux from a usbstick (guess i will be using filo
and boot the device a uda1)

I've managed to extract my videobios image with awardeco and that gave
me a videobios file which was exactly 57344byte, how can i apply this
to my linuxbios.rom file?

The issue is the linuxbios.rom file is allready 256kb, Where would i
change the size of this built "rom file" and what should i set it to:

I tried setting this:
option ROM_SIZE=256*1024
to:
option ROM_SIZE=200*1024
Then doing:

buildtarget via/epia-m
cd via/epia-m/via_epia-m
make

This gives me this:

...
./buildrom linuxbios.strip linuxbios.rom payload 0x10000 0x12000
payload (41187) + linuxbios (65536) size larger than ROM (73728) size!
make[1]: *** [linuxbios.rom] Error 1
...

Any suggestions would be welcome.

[Peter Stuge]

On Thu, Nov 09, 2006 at 03:42:20PM +0100, Kurt André Selbach wrote:
> Hi!
>
> I'm trying to get a working linuxbios on my Via epia m2 12000,
> with 1200mhz processor and 512mb ram.
>
> The goal is to boot linux from a usbstick (guess i will be using
> filo and boot the device a uda1)

Yep. I haven't tried that on my board, but from IDE works just fine.
> I've managed to extract my videobios image with awardeco and that
> gave me a videobios file which was exactly 57344byte, how can i
> apply this to my linuxbios.rom file?

Hm, this may not be the correct image. I'd suggest dumping the VGA
BIOS from when the board is running Linux under the factor BIOS
thusly:

dd if=/dev/mem of=/tmp/vgabios.bin bs=1k count=64 skip=768

See also http://linuxbios.org/VGA_support
> The issue is the linuxbios.rom file is allready 256kb, Where would i
> change the size of this built "rom file" and what should i set it to:
>
> I tried setting this:
> option ROM_SIZE=256*1024
> to:
> option ROM_SIZE=200*1024
> Then doing:
>
> buildtarget via/epia-m
> cd via/epia-m/via_epia-m
> make
>
> This gives me this:
>
> ...
> ./buildrom linuxbios.strip linuxbios.rom payload 0x10000 0x12000
> payload (41187) + linuxbios (65536) size larger than ROM (73728) size!
> make[1]: *** [linuxbios.rom] Error 1
> ...
>
> Any suggestions would be welcome.

After the above dd command try these settings in your config:

option ROM_SIZE=192*1024
option ROM_SECTION_OFFSET=0x10000

It looks like the latter is 0 now.

This is all horribly unintuitive but should improve in v3.

If it still doesn't work you could try just inserting your image
right at the start of your 256kb linuxbios.rom like this:

dd if=vga56k.bin of=linuxbios.rom bs=56k count=1 conv=notrunc

But please try the other way first, I think it should work better.

//Peter

[Anton]

On Thu, 9 Nov 2006 18:37:08 +0100
Peter Stuge  wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 09, 2006 at 03:42:20PM +0100, Kurt André Selbach wrote:
> > Hi!
> >
> > I'm trying to get a working linuxbios on my Via epia m2 12000,
> > with 1200mhz processor and 512mb ram.
> >
> > The goal is to boot linux from a usbstick (guess i will be using
> > filo and boot the device a uda1)
>
> Yep. I haven't tried that on my board, but from IDE works just fine.
> > I've managed to extract my videobios image with awardeco and that
> > gave me a videobios file which was exactly 57344byte, how can i
> > apply this to my linuxbios.rom file?
>
> Hm, this may not be the correct image. I'd suggest dumping the VGA
> BIOS from when the board is running Linux under the factor BIOS
> thusly:

I'd rather say the output from awardeco is
correct. VideoBIOS has to padded later to 64k boundary.
Dumping from live system may be incorrect for videorom
bigger than 32k. Contact "Carl-Daniel U. Hailfinger" for
details.

Thanks.

[Carl-Daniel Hailfinger]

Hi,

Anton wrote:
> On Thu, 9 Nov 2006 18:37:08 +0100
> Peter Stuge  wrote:
> > On Thu, Nov 09, 2006 at 03:42:20PM +0100, Kurt André Selbach wrote:
> > > I've managed to extract my videobios image with awardeco and that
> > > gave me a videobios file which was exactly 57344byte, how can i
> > > apply this to my linuxbios.rom file?
> >
> > Hm, this may not be the correct image. I'd suggest dumping the VGA
> > BIOS from when the board is running Linux under the factor BIOS
> > thusly:
>
> I'd rather say the output from awardeco is
> correct. VideoBIOS has to padded later to 64k boundary.
> Dumping from live system may be incorrect for videorom
> bigger than 32k. Contact "Carl-Daniel U. Hailfinger" for
> details.

RAM below 1 MB often does not have enough room to store the full BIOS.
This means parts of the (Video)BIOS may be truncated. I know of a few
laptops where the VideoBIOS size is >32k, but only the first 32k of
it are kept in memory after execution. That's (with a proper
structure) enough for VideoBIOS tasks after bootup (VESA and stuff)
but not enough to actually boot the video card.
The only way to get the full VideoBIOS are Anton's BIOS extraction
tools. The VideoBIOS file is usually padded to 64k with this command:

dd conv=notrunc conv=sync bs=65536 if=extractedvideobios of=vbios.rom

Hope this helps.

Regards,
Carl-Daniel

[Richard Smith]

Kurt Andre' Selbach wrote:
> The issue is the linuxbios.rom file is allready 256kb, Where would i
> change the size of this built "rom file" and what should i set it to:

Try this:

Snap your video bios image to 64KiB with dd

option ROM_SIZE=(256-64)*1024
option FALLBACK_SIZE=128*1024

romimage "fallback"
        option USE_FALLBACK_IMAGE=1
        option ROM_IMAGE_SIZE=33*1024
        option LINUXBIOS_EXTRA_VERSION=".0Fallback"
        payload /tmp/filo.elf
end

buildrom ./linuxbios.rom ROM_SIZE "fallback"