Fwd: 440BX - Worth the time?

[Dennis Veatch]

Opps forgot the file.

----------  Forwarded Message  ----------

Subject: 440BX - Worth the time?
Date: Tuesday 07 January 2003 07:49 pm
From: Dennis Veatch 
To: [e-mail]

I'm thinking about a switch to Linuxbios for this mobo. The status page on
 the website says unstable but there is no current date of this status. I
 looked through the archives and must have overlooked any references to this
 chipset. So would this board be a good candidate? A few notes about it.

1) currently a 400MHz PII that I plan on bumping up to a 700MHz PIII (slot
 1). 2) the SCSI is an Adaptec 2940/7881.
3) the video card is an ATI Radeon 9000.

Attached is the output of lspci -vvv. Any pointers will be most appreciated.

Thanks

[Richard A. Smith]

On Tue, 7 Jan 2003 19:59:05 -0500, Dennis Veatch wrote:
> I'm thinking about a switch to Linuxbios for this mobo. The status page on
>  the website says unstable but there is no current date of this status. I
>  looked through the archives and must have overlooked any references to this
>  chipset. So would this board be a good candidate? A few notes about it.

Dennis,

Suposedly the 440BX is supposed to work.  Some of the mainboards in
the mainbord directory are 440xx based and people claim they work. 
We have a 440bx based SBC that I tried linuxbios on briefly but I was
never able to get it to turn on the ram properly.

IIRC I could see the SPD read command issued on the bus and then see
the info return but the value read from the data register was zero.

So I'm very interested in any testing that you do.

I've attached the config file I was using for my testing.  There
isn't anything special or specific to our board so this should be
fine for any BX based board.

One thing to look at though would be the DEVFN of the PIIX4 and make
sure its the same as the config file.  Thats where the I2C bridge is
and it needs that address to set up and talk to the RAM SPD.

Also I haven't worked on this in 6-8 months so this config file may
be really out of date.  If for some reason it won't build then thats
why.

We are about to spin a new rev of this board and this version _will_
run linuxbios.  So I'm going to have to fix this at some point in the
near future and I would be happy to have some help.

[Ronald G. Minnich]

I do have linuxbios working fine with SPD support on the digital logic 
smartcore piii -- that is a 440bx box.

ron

[Christopher Stutts]

I'm using the BX with mobile PIIIs.  No SMBUS, just hardcoded SDRAM
init.  Old LinuxBIOS tarball, and there were a couple minor PCI config
issues.  BX PCI config regs not in the standard BAR locations.  But it's
solid.  Memory tests passed after tweeking SDRAM drive strength
settings.