Flashroms of more tha 2Mbits

[Xavier Pegenaute]

Hi all,

is possible to find flashroms with at least 6 o 8 Mbits of Memory to 
substitute the normal flashrom ..?, i prefer don't use DoC ...
if it's possible, why you use DoC ? by price, by the possibiliti of Disk ?

These days i was asking for many things about LinuxBios ..., this is 
because i'm studing the possibility to make my final thesis over 
LinuxBios ..., my objective is enlarge the capacities of kernel that is 
running into flashrom, just like manage hardware directly, and other 
things ..., for this reason i need more space in flashrom ..., and 
understand rombios functionality ..., at the moment i only knew about 
Linux Kernel ...

Thanks.
Xavi.

[steven james]

Greetings,

Unfortunatly, on the older boards, it's physically impossible to have more
than a 4Mbit flash (many boards are limited to 2Mbit) because of not
enough address lines. The DoC gets around that by being able to page in
bits of the ROM kind of like EMM from the bad old days.

Newer boards that use LPC or Firmware Hub flashes usually come with 4 or
8Mbit and can (in theory) accept up to 32Mbit. In practice, the chipsets
may impose limits on that.

G'day,
sjames

On Mon, 3 Mar 2003, Xavier Pegenaute wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> is possible to find flashroms with at least 6 o 8 Mbits of Memory to 
> substitute the normal flashrom ..?, i prefer don't use DoC ...
> if it's possible, why you use DoC ? by price, by the possibiliti of Disk ?
>
> These days i was asking for many things about LinuxBios ..., this is 
> because i'm studing the possibility to make my final thesis over 
> LinuxBios ..., my objective is enlarge the capacities of kernel that is 
> running into flashrom, just like manage hardware directly, and other 
> things ..., for this reason i need more space in flashrom ..., and 
> understand rombios functionality ..., at the moment i only knew about 
> Linux Kernel ...
>
> Thanks.
> Xavi.
>
> Linuxbios mailing list
> [e-mail]
> http://www.clustermatic.org/mailman/listinfo/linuxbios

[Bari Ari]

Xavier Pegenaute wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> is possible to find flashroms with at least 6 o 8 Mbits of Memory to 
> substitute the normal flashrom ..?, i prefer don't use DoC ...
> if it's possible, why you use DoC ? by price, by the possibiliti of 
> Disk ?

There are Flash parts available with densities up to 256Mbits. The 
problem is that motherboard layouts (and chipsets) have only enough 
address lines to access 2 Mbits of memory. So just replacing a 2Mb part 
with a larger one won't help.

Bari

[Ronald G. Minnich]

On Mon, 3 Mar 2003, Bari Ari wrote:
> There are Flash parts available with densities up to 256Mbits. The 
> problem is that motherboard layouts (and chipsets) have only enough 
> address lines to access 2 Mbits of memory. So just replacing a 2Mb part 
> with a larger one won't help.

Except for these lovely intel parts, the 82802? series. I am using one now 
that is low pin count, but 1 Mbyte. how does intel do it? they use 
address/address multiplexing, which in the limit by design will allow 
parts of up to 256 MBYTES (or 28 bits of address if my math is wrong :-0)

Thus we will in the small low pin count package be able to fit linux 
kernels once again. Lots of them! Very nice.

DoC parts just don't seem to be keeping up with these trends, and the
company has been hard to work with, which is why FreeBSD is dropping DoC
support in 6.0. Given the higher densities to come in LPC packages, and
the uncooperative attitude of the DoC vendor, I would say that the 82802? 
series is going to be very popular.

ron

[Bari Ari]

Ronald G. Minnich wrote:
> Except for these lovely intel parts, the 82802? series. I am using one now 
> that is low pin count, but 1 Mbyte. how does intel do it? they use 
> address/address multiplexing, which in the limit by design will allow 
> parts of up to 256 MBYTES (or 28 bits of address if my math is wrong :-0)
>
> Thus we will in the small low pin count package be able to fit linux 
> kernels once again. Lots of them! Very nice.

Linux kernels, EFI and all types of bloatware :-) if this silliness wins 
out. The firmware hubs with LPC interfaces will be the only way to go.

Bari

[Ronald G. Minnich]

so the one thing we may have to thank EFI for is large flash. I knew that 
some big bios would require that someday.

ron