Tyan Tomcat i845GL (S2098)

[Edgar Lovecraft]

I am not new to linux, just linuxBIOS :)
cool thing I think, thanks to all for making such a thing possible.
Now for my question....
I am looking to develop a linuxbios for the Tyan Tomcat i845GL (S2098) MB,
it uses the i845GL chipset.  I have seen some posts in the archives about
'do you support this yet' but did not find any conclusive answers.  I am
very willing to make this work if no else has, but I do need some pointers
(or would greatly appreciate them) to get started.  This board does have a
4MB flash so I would like to keep the BIOS in the BIOS (basically just be
able to boot and have all that I can cram in the space available).
As I said, I do have plenty of linux compile experience, and perhaps I am
being a little gun shy on this, but I really really do not want to go
and start makeing expensive paper weights.
So any and all comments/pointers/help would be greatly appreciated, as
would any pointers to 'best practices' and the such.
Thanks again in advance!

snipit from the Tyan spec sheet if any of this helps:
Processor
 • Single mPGA478 ZIF socket
 • Supports one Intel® Pentium® 4 processor or
    Celeron (mPGA478) processor
 • Onboard VRM (VRM 9.1 spec)
 • Front-Side Bus support for 400MHz

Chipset
 • Intel® 845GL chipset
 • MCH + ICH4 + FWH
 • ITE IT8712F LPC I/O ASIC
--

--EAL--

[Bari Ari]

Edgar Lovecraft wrote:
> I am looking to develop a linuxbios for the Tyan Tomcat i845GL (S2098) MB,
> it uses the i845GL chipset.

Send LSPCI.

-Bari

[Edgar Lovecraft]

Bari Ari wrote:
> Edgar Lovecraft wrote:
> > I am looking to develop a linuxbios for the Tyan Tomcat i845GL (S2098)
> > MB, it uses the i845GL chipset.
>
> Send LSPCI.

[Bari Ari]

Edgar Lovecraft wrote:
> > > I am looking to develop a linuxbios for the Tyan Tomcat i845GL (S2098)
> > > MB, it uses the i845GL chipset.
> >
> > Send LSPCI.

"Jia Jianwei"  was working on the 845 a couple months 
ago:

The source tree is changed but very similar,  As you know, many boards have
the same chipset, but have different superio and pci devices. And we also
merged some ethernet drivers and file system so that we can download from a
TFTP server in very early stage. If I can finish the BIOS on this board, Of
course I'll contribute some general code to freebios so that more developers
can benifit from it.

Jianwei

----- Original Message -----
From: "ron minnich" 
To: "Jia Jianwei" 
Cc: 
Sent: Monday, January 19, 2004 2:29 PM
Subject: Re: 82845GV DDR SDRAM initialization
> > On Mon, 19 Jan 2004, Jia Jianwei wrote:
> > > > Thank you very much!
> > > > I'm using V1 and have changed a lot to fit our own need.
> > now you are worrying me ...
> >
> > what are you changing? If possible we'd like to merge 845 support back
> > into the tree.
> >
> > ron

[ron minnich]

at this point, here at LANL, our focus is 64-bit boards and embedded stuff 
like EPIA, so this one falls through the cracks here. We can assist you 
with porting but can not do the work ourselves.

So if you want an assisted port letus know.

ron

[Edgar Lovecraft]

ron minnich wrote:
> at this point, here at LANL, our focus is 64-bit boards and embedded
> stuff like EPIA, so this one falls through the cracks here. We can
> assist you with porting but can not do the work ourselves.
>
> So if you want an assisted port letus know.

[ron minnich]

if you are going to do this, go ahead and look at existing V2 ports. For 
your chipset, I think that looking at K8 would be very confusing. Look at 
PPC and EPIA ports. Just try to get a feel for how it gets put together 
and then think a bit about the =830 and then talk to us about what you 
want to do. If you go V2, all the code will be C; you want to go V2 :-)

ron