best motherboard for linuxbios

[Alessio Sangalli]

Hi. We will have to install linuxbios on a number of systems for 
multimedia applications. Reading the page

http://www.clustermatic.org/lb/status/index.html

it seems that pc-chips motherboards aren't so well supported as I 
thought at first; which socketA mobo would you suggest me for the best 
compatibility with linuxbios? elitegroup k7sem perhaps?

bye & thank you
as

[Ronald G. Minnich]

On Fri, 24 Jan 2003, Alessio Sangalli wrote:
> http://www.clustermatic.org/lb/status/index.html
>
> it seems that pc-chips motherboards aren't so well supported as I 
> thought at first; which socketA mobo would you suggest me for the best 
> compatibility with linuxbios? elitegroup k7sem perhaps?

no, the problem is our status page is way out of date. What pcchips board 
do you want to use? have you considered buying a board from cwlinux.com?

BTW we will in 24 hours have the new web site at the new location.

ron

[Thomas Wehrspann]

> it seems that pc-chips motherboards aren't so well supported as I
> thought at first; which socketA mobo would you suggest me for the best
> compatibility with linuxbios? elitegroup k7sem perhaps?

I have no problems with the elitegroup K7SEM for my VDR system.
It runs about half a year now with framebuffer support, network, dvb and no
harddisks.
But harddisks should also work.

Thomas

[Nikolai Vladychevski]

Thomas Wehrspann writes:
> > it seems that pc-chips motherboards aren't so well supported as I
> > thought at first; which socketA mobo would you suggest me for the best
> > compatibility with linuxbios? elitegroup k7sem perhaps?
>
> I have no problems with the elitegroup K7SEM for my VDR system.
> It runs about half a year now with framebuffer support, network, dvb and no

the problem with k7sem is that is discontinued already , so I don't know 
where would you get it.

nikolai

[John van Vlaaderen]

This has got to be it !!

http://www.mini-itx.com/projects/spacecase/page7.asp

Quiet -- no fans, available from cwlinux, all it needs is datasheets for 
the VgaBIOS ;)

GFX:
Integrated AGP2X with 2D/3D Graphics Acceleration
Motion Compensation for DVD playback
VIP port for video overlay function

PWR:
A company called morex in aisa somewhere makes a power supply that 
converts from AC, you supply the external source.  Car battery, if you 
please ( I do ).

MORE:
http://www.hitechmods.com/reviews/motherboards/VIA_EPIA/via_epia.shtml

http://www.cwlinux.com/eng/products/products_sbc.php

On Friday, January 24, 2003, at 08:19 PM, Nikolai Vladychevski wrote:
> Thomas Wehrspann writes:
> > > it seems that pc-chips motherboards aren't so well supported as I
> > > thought at first; which socketA mobo would you suggest me for the best
> > > compatibility with linuxbios? elitegroup k7sem perhaps?
> >
> > I have no problems with the elitegroup K7SEM for my VDR system.
> > It runs about half a year now with framebuffer support, network, dvb 
> > and no
>
> the problem with k7sem is that is discontinued already , so I don't 
> know where would you get it.
>
> nikolai
> _______________________________________________
> Linuxbios mailing list
> [e-mail]
> http://www.clustermatic.org/mailman/listinfo/linuxbios

CXN, Inc. Contact: [e-mail]
President, The Linux Society
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/linux-society
linux society distro -> http://www.thinman.com/eLSD/readme
ThinMan is a registered trademark of CXN, Inc.

440bx build failure

[Richard A. Smith]

I'm finally getting back around to trying to make LinuxBIOS boot on
our 440bx based boards.  I updated my tree to the latest CVS.

Now mu original config file fails to build.

I get undefined reference to 'console_tx_al' and 'console_tx_hex8'

digging around I found the macro where these get called in
'arch/intel.h' 
for 'intel_chip_post_macro()'

Its wrapped in a 'ifndef SERIAL_POST'  but of course SERIAL_POST is
now always defined.  If I rework the #ifndef to a #if and set
SERIAL_POST to 0 then it builds again.

So this appears to perhaps be a legacy option problem?  Pre the
option bla=1 era.

Looking through things I see that lots has changed in this stuff
since I last looked at it.  I'm not really sure what the right fix is
to make the post codes go out the serial port again.

Attempting to determine whats going on and where things are getting
called from is still a little confusing to me.

What do I need to change to make it work and be a proper config item?

440bx build failure

[Ronald G. Minnich]

richard, here is a known-good config file for the digital logic 
smartcore-p3, a known-good platform. Just try building with this and see 
how the errors work out :-)

Also what mainboard are you using?

ron

target smartcore-p3

mainboard digitallogic/smartcore-p3

# Enable Serial Console for debugging
option SERIAL_CONSOLE=1
option NO_KEYBOARD=1 
option INBUF_COPY=1
option DEFAULT_CONSOLE_LOGLEVEL=8
option MAXIMUM_CONSOLE_LOGLEVEL=8
option DEBUG=1
option USE_GENERIC_ROM=1

# MEMORY TESTING USING MEMTEST
option USE_ELF_BOOT=1
option RAMTEST=0
option CONFIG_COMPRESS=0
#payload ../eepro100-5.07.ebi
#payload ../memtest86.ebi
#payload ../82559er.ebi 
payload ../memtest

440bx build failure

[Richard A. Smith]

On Sat, 25 Jan 2003 23:55:56 -0700 (MST), Ronald G. Minnich wrote:
> richard, here is a known-good config file for the digital logic 
> smartcore-p3, a known-good platform. Just try building with this and see 
> how the errors work out :-)

Not good... I get nothing.  It built though so I guess thats a step
up.
> Also what mainboard are you using?

The Bitworks IMS board.  Its a custom board we designed.  Looks
really close to the Intel reference design for the 440bx.  We are
using a NSC pc87351 for the superio.  I added that into the p3 config
instead of the SMC but no luck.

With out SERIAL_POST=1 my config generates output but the ramtest
fails.  So I'm going to start looking at the differences between the
p3 and my IMS config.  Perhaps something will show up.

440bx build failure

[Richard A. Smith]

On Sat, 25 Jan 2003 23:55:56 -0700 (MST), Ronald G. Minnich wrote:
> richard, here is a known-good config file for the digital logic

Man there is some serious lag from when I send a post and when it
finally hits the list.  I sent a response over an hour ago and its
still not there.

Well anyway.  I got the smartcore-p3 config to do something. 
Actually it worked the first time I just didn't have my serial cable
plugged back in.  Duh!.

The bad news is it dosen't do anything different than my config file.
 When it jumps to Linuxbios in ram it crashes.

Which is really not suprising since my config file and the smarcore
are pretty much identical.  I didn't have the L440BX option set but
grepping the tree dosen't show that option as doing anything.  The
only place it shows up is in a compiler flag setting in the intel
mainboard dir which isn't called.

I think I'm going to try and hardcode some conservative memory
settings and see if I can get something going,

440bx build failure

[Ronald G. Minnich]

consider putting some dumpnorth calls in your sdram setup code to see 
what's going on.

ron