** Proprietary **
We have SC2200 board from National and being trying with ExpressROM biose code given by National.
Will it be advisable to boot the board with LinuxBios and still use all the pheripheral interfaces and displays.
Please help
Thanx and regards Yogesh
On Sat, Dec 14, 2002 at 04:19:12PM +0530, Yogesh Desai wrote:
** Proprietary **
Please refrain from sending confidential, proprietary or similar emails to public mailing lists. It makes it unclear whether we are allowed to read your email and answer your question(s). Please also note that emails sent to public mailing lists usually end up archived somewhere.
We have SC2200 board from National and being trying with ExpressROM biose code given by National.
Will it be advisable to boot the board with LinuxBios and still use all the pheripheral interfaces and displays.
Please help
Judging from this you want us to read and reply so here goes:
Christer Weinigel has implemented support for the SCx2xx Geodes in LinuxBIOS. Check out the nano platform in the source tree. Some of the features in the Geode depend on VSA helper ROMs however and there is currently no VSA support in LinuxBIOS.
In effect this means that you can't use XpressGRAPHICS or XpressAUDIO (yet).
The kernel framebuffer driver from NatSemi will work just fine without XpressGRAPHICS though - it's just legacy VGA emulation that doesn't work.
XpressAUDIO is required for the NatSemi Linux OSS driver to work, so no sound will be available.
There has been talk about implementing support for VSA2 in LinuxBIOS and some discussion on licensing issues for the VSA ROM blobs included with the BLDT (aka XpressLOADER) but no code has been written yet. This might partly be because we're out of documentation and maybe partly because noone has really needed it yet.
//Peter
* Peter Stuge stuge-linuxbios@cdy.org [021214 16:04]:
The kernel framebuffer driver from NatSemi will work just fine without XpressGRAPHICS though - it's just legacy VGA emulation that doesn't work.
Which version of the fb driver did you use? I did not get any light on the screen with the 2 versions I tried, neither on TV out nor on VGA out. With the original Award BIOS (not XpressROM) it works.
There has been talk about implementing support for VSA2 in LinuxBIOS and some discussion on licensing issues for the VSA ROM blobs included with the BLDT (aka XpressLOADER) but no code has been written yet. This might partly be because we're out of documentation and maybe partly because noone has really needed it yet.
The documentation would probably not be a problem, but the question is whether the code that allows loading VSA modules is not NatSemi IP.
Stefan
On Sat, Dec 14, 2002 at 06:13:33PM +0100, Stefan Reinauer wrote:
- Peter Stuge stuge-linuxbios@cdy.org [021214 16:04]:
The kernel framebuffer driver from NatSemi will work just fine without XpressGRAPHICS though - it's just legacy VGA emulation that doesn't work.
Which version of the fb driver did you use? I did not get any light on the screen with the 2 versions I tried, neither on TV out nor on VGA out. With the original Award BIOS (not XpressROM) it works.
I haven't tried it myself but it was my understanding that it would work, I believe I've read success stories on this list.. But I might be wrong.
My own experience is from the BLDT mostly if not always including XpressGRAPHICS, and even then the kernel framebuffer wouldn't work if I set the video RAM size to anything but 4MB. That might be something worth checking out for you. Any other setting led to black output or stray green pixels here and there.
There has been talk about implementing support for VSA2 in LinuxBIOS and some discussion on licensing issues for the VSA ROM blobs included with the BLDT (aka XpressLOADER) but no code has been written yet. This might partly be because we're out of documentation and maybe partly because noone has really needed it yet.
The documentation would probably not be a problem, but the question is whether the code that allows loading VSA modules is not NatSemi IP.
The one in XpressROM and the BLDT surely is, but I don't think they can claim rights to someone else's work if they've granted access to the relevant documentation..
//Peter
In working with the sis630, I noticed the linuxbios code as it stands does not normally enable the ram in the hole at 0xf0000 when booting from flash. So I turned it on and discovered that Linux needs the gdt, which gets covered by the ram when it is turned on. So I wrote code to shadow the gdt to ram (at the same addr), and discovered that the pirq_routing table will overwrite the gdt if it is too large (>0x50 bytes), which of course mine was. (pirq_table at offset 0, gdtptr at offset 0x40).
So I decided to set the bios base address to 0xffff0000 using the biosbase command to avoid the whole problem (normally defaults to 0xf0000). But Linux won't boot with a gdt located >1M (apparently), so I added code to relocate the gdt into lower ram where it works fine.
Maybe someone knows else knows why Linux won't start with a gdt in high flash but I couldn't figure it out.
-Steve
On Sat, 14 Dec 2002, Peter Stuge wrote:
The kernel framebuffer driver from NatSemi will work just fine without XpressGRAPHICS though - it's just legacy VGA emulation that doesn't work.
I missed this part of the discussion -- is this driver in any linux kernel tree that is out there or do I grab it somewhere.
I want to try making an instant-boot LRP box.
ron
* Ronald G. Minnich rminnich@lanl.gov [021216 16:32]:
On Sat, 14 Dec 2002, Peter Stuge wrote: I missed this part of the discussion -- is this driver in any linux kernel tree that is out there or do I grab it somewhere.
http://www.linux4.tv/ has geodefb for 2.4.0 in their National Semiconductor Geode(tm) SP1SC10 Reference kit but it's huuuge and ugly (said to support mpeg decoding and such though). I fiddled it together to work on my box when running award bios but not with VSA-free linuxbios (might be the missing VSA was not the reason though)
I want to try making an instant-boot LRP box.
maybe you're more happy with serial or network console
Stefan
On Mon, 16 Dec 2002, Stefan Reinauer wrote:
maybe you're more happy with serial or network console
sounds that way.
What's the "best" LRP-like thing out there that runs 2.4?
ron
* Ronald G. Minnich rminnich@lanl.gov [021216 16:32]:
I missed this part of the discussion -- is this driver in any linux kernel tree that is out there or do I grab it somewhere.
http://www.eason.com/linux/ contains a stripped down version, that is still not really the minimum needed i guess. Haven't tried this though
Stefan
* Yogesh Desai yogeshd@myw.ltindia.com [021214 11:49]:
Will it be advisable to boot the board with LinuxBios and still use all the pheripheral interfaces and displays.
To do this you probably have to call the VSA2 binary drivers that come with the Xpress ROM kit. Otherwise you are not able to use some of the peripheral components. I've been initializing network and usb correctly without VSA, but with other components you might run out of luck. I heard rumours that you can get video to work just with the Linux framebuffer driver, but I did not get anything but a black screen without VSA init. Sound definitely needs VSA init, as there is no driver that uses the native interface
Stefan
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Peter Stuge -
Ronald G. Minnich -
Stefan Reinauer -
Steve M. Gehlbach -
Yogesh Desai