SIS630ET coreboot challenge - coreboot

24 May 2010


      Hi all,
After hours spent yesterday, some Chipquik, one heatgun pass, and a
dead board scare later, I managed to solder a PLCC socket on my TUSI-M
board.
SIS630ET is still on my radar, but I'm going to need some help.
In the spirit of the "coreboot challenge" below, let me propose
another one: Port coreboot v4 to SIS630ET, then to Asus TUSI-M.
This is a challenge because most if not all of the SIS chipsets have
no public documentation, and so far from reversing my factory BIOS I
don't recognize any of the registers the TUSI-M factory BIOS programs,
after reading what's available from coreboot v1. To be legally safe, I
would like one person/team to reverse the factory BIOS of a number of
630ET boards, then produce a documentation. Then another person/team
(can be myself) do the port to that documentation.
And one interesting bit: I noticed a special check for "CentaurHauls"
CPUID in the factory BIOS, which also uses CAR.
Cheers
Keith
On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 10:17 AM, Joseph Smith joe@settoplinux.org wrote:
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On Tue, 27 Apr 2010 10:01:28 -0400, Keith Hui buurin@gmail.com wrote:
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...
...
Hello,
I want to propose a "coreboot challenge" to first port coreboot to the
i840 chpset, second port coreboot to support a very rare i840 dual cpu
board, third instead of RAMBUS (which i840 is designed for) this board
uses SDRAM. I think this would be a very interesting port for coreboot.
The board is a AMI Megatrends MegaDual. The user manual can be found
here: http://www.ami.com/support/doc/MegaDual_mb_man.PDF
I have four of these rare boards and am willing to donate three of them
(one person each, less shipping costs of course) to anyone who is
willing to take on this challenge. Let me know if your interested.
Sounds like some sort of reference board for workstations/servers.
i840+SDRAM means this board has one or two MTHs. This is going to be
epic.
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Yes it should be interesting :-)
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(No I won't be able to attempt it - I still have 440BX and SIS630ET in
my pipeline.)
That's OK Keith. I actually have allot of other i8xx boards that are a
higher priority than this one. I knew I was not going to be able to get to
it for a while that is why I am offering up my 3 spare boards for free so
others could hack along if they want.
I am actually suprised no one has jumped for the oppritunity to get a free
motherboard.
I do have a few SIS 630's kicking around so I will be looking forward to
your work on that :-)
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Thanks,
Joseph Smith
Set-Top-Linux
www.settoplinux.org