On Thu, Dec 20, 2007 at 02:52:31PM +0100, Lars Randers wrote:
I've been dabbling with this board and the writeups for
about a week
to little avail, so I'd like to hear from anyone who have
this board
running stable with LB, and preferably with VGA enabled.
I have a 6k which was fairly stable with VGA until the
capacitors blew, but I did not use all features on the board.
I can't seem to build the bios successfully with the
Config.vga.filo.lb configs.
Hm, I also seem to recall that the sample config didn't work.
But I think it was fairly easy to sort out. What errors do
you encounter?
/root/LinuxBIOSv2/src/mainboard/via/epia-m/auto.c -o auto.inc
earlymtrr.c:23.0:
"XIP_ROM_BASE is not a multiple of XIP_ROM_SIZE"
make[1]: *** [auto.inc] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory
`/root/LinuxBIOSv2/targets/via/epia-m/epia-m/normal'
make: *** [normal/linuxbios.rom] Error 1
I have also been investigating spurrious interrupts with
the CF slot
when running Linux (Centos 4.5 - 2.6.9 kernel)
This is a hardware problem with the Ricoh chip.
Can the interrupt be disabled BIOS wise or simply safely ignored?
and the strange LAN lockup, which seems to be related to a
DMA issue
in the southbridge chip.
AFAIK this is also a hardware problem.
So it's not possible to make a BIOS fix, workaround, disable DMA completely?
Should I just trash the board and look for a more stable platform?
If you have options, that may not be a bad idea.
It's a nice platform, low power and all, but if it's
hopelessly flawed
in design it's out. Any input on the issue welcome!
What other boards are your candidates?
Well it's a board I had lying around from an earlier attempt at making
a PVR. I think I had happily forgotten all about my woes with it :)
The current project is for a Trixbox PBX that I want to move out of my
Vmware environment because of sound tearing, how ever I want a diskless
solution as the Vmware server is more than capable of supplying storage
over NFS.
Furthermore I'm struggeling to get the Linux kernel to boot through
the initrd without ending up in a panic. I know it's not a
LB issue,
but as I said, I'd like to get in contact with anyone who has any
knowledge into the problem.
I don't like initrds much. As it stands you will need one
solely for the purpose of resetting the Ricoh chip, but I
would prefer to hack those few lines of code into FILO
instead, so that the initrd can be skipped.
If we could get some code into FILO or the BIOS to somehow trick
the Linux kernel into thinking it's looking at a genuine IDE port
i.e. find a /dev/hda instead of the Ricoh chip, I'd be thrilled.
That would solve my initrd woes at the same time.
The wiki is incomplete in this respect and I certainly
wouldn't mind
donating some of my time in return updating it if I could get it
working.
Well, you should be able to find other pages about how to
make an initrd. It will also very greatly with distributions,
which makes generic advice somewhat difficult to produce.
Why do you want the initrd in the first place? :) Is it some
other reason than resetcf?
Well since the stock kernel is modular built, I need the initrd for loading
the hardware modules for the pcmcia / yenta as well as the ext3 fs stuff.
The hardest part seems to be getting cardmgr to run from inside the nash
script runner. I'm getting a strange select(): bad file descriptor error from it.
The funny thing is that if I force nash out into a shell the command works from there, it's just a bit selfdefeating to do it that way... It's frustrating to feel one is so close to making it work but still no luck.
I have attempted to recompile the stock kernel from source, but after patching
it up using the CentOS buildenvironment it just fails compilation miserably.
I have succeeded in compiling the bleeding edge 2.6.23.9 kernel with root_on_nfs,
but it corrupts the target fs badly, so I'd like to stay with 2.6.9.
//Peter
-
Lars Randers