Re: [coreboot] Test SeaBIOS AHCI support

[Neo The User]

Hi, I have a GA-MA785GM-US2H (GIGABYTE 785GM board) with AHCI SATA, and if I have AHCI off in SeaBIOS, I get caught in an infinite restarting loop. If I have it on, I can actually reach GRUB and select my kernel but Windows 7 and Linux both don't start and with linux, a kernel panic happens with the last message on the screen "[    0.180179] pci 0000:00:11.0: set SATA to AHCI mode"

I spent about a month on and off porting coreboot to my board, but the only reason it took me that long was because I only have one PC and I do not have an environment set up for serial debugging, so it was all guess work. I noticed that the MA785GMT and MA78GM were in the tree so I based most of the work off of those two boards, plus some lines from the Tilapia board.

I have attached the somewhat working port as a patch (ma785gm-us2h.patch) and I didn't touch the GPL headers at all, keeping the original ones from Tilapia, if that was ok. If not, I'll be glad to change it accordingly.

I hope the patch format is correct!

Signed-off-by: Alec Ari

--- On Fri, 12/31/10, Scott Duplichan  wrote:
> From: Scott Duplichan 
> Subject: Re: [coreboot] Test SeaBIOS AHCI support
> To: "'Kevin O'Connor'" 
> Cc: [e-mail]
> Date: Friday, December 31, 2010, 4:43 PM
>
> On Fri, Dec 31, 2010 at 10:21:32AM -0600, Scott Duplichan
> wrote:
> > Hello Kevin,
> >
> > Thanks a lot. Is this native 16-bit AHCI support that
>
> doesn't rely on an option rom?
> >
>
> ]It's native AHCI DMA support.  (No option rom
> needed.)
>
> ]-Kevin
>
> That is great to hear. Some HP notebooks have this
> capability, but
> I know of no others. This setup should allow cutting
> seconds from
> Windows boot time because Windows spends lots of time on
> IDE drives
> that are not installed. If all IDE devices are disabled and
> only
> AHCI visible, Windows can boot a lot faster.
>
> I made an initial test using coreboot+seabios on an AMD
> RS780/SB700
> system. So far it is not detecting the drives. But this
> test required
> hacking in code to disable the SB700 IDE device and switch
> the SATA
> device from IDE mode to AHCI mode. I have not yet checked
> to see if
> that code is even working correctly. I will continue
> debugging this
> in a day or two.
>
> Thanks,
> Scott

Test SeaBIOS AHCI support

[Peter Stuge]

Hi Alec,

Neo The User wrote:
> I have attached the somewhat working port as a patch
> (ma785gm-us2h.patch)

Cool!
> I hope the patch format is correct!

Well, I'd say no. It is impossible to review this patch because it
duplicates (nearly) all code for another board.

It would be very good if you could start with a patch that is simply
a diff from the ma785gmt board.

Finally, when copying files later, into the new ma785gm directory,
please make sure to use svn to do copies, so that patches become much
smaller, or at the very least that the history is kept.

But please first start with a diff against an existing board. If the
differences are small enough maybe the same code can handle both boards.

//Peter