Re: Information on TIARA project

[Ollie Lho]

"Larry G. Linde" wrote:
> We are working on a 540 design at present and need to start porting to the
> 540/950 chipset.
>
> However we have not been able to find any off the shelf MB's with the 540
> yet. If you could get
> Us the name of a existing 540 MB with the 950 that we could buy that would
> help a lot. Also
> And code/doc info in setup that required on the 540/950 would help as well.
>
> If you would like I will be in TW in about 2 weeks. I can stop by and say
> hello and show you
> What we are doing.
>
> -larry

First of all, it is amazing (from our point of view) that without official
support you could do such chip init stuff so clean, how did you do this ??

As you know we are working with FreeBIOS/LinuxBIOS project, we are also
intrested in any similiar projects too. We will provide any support we
can, we will provide you the necessary documents, BIOS source/pseudo code
and hardware demo boards. As posted by Jeff Garzik et. al. on freebios
list we think there is possibility to cooperate/merge these free bios
projects.

For 540+950 issue, there are two things to note. First is that, from
business point of view, it seems that 540 chipset will not in mass
production in the near future so it would be very difficult to find
a 540 M/B in the market. We are rather focusing on 630 and the upcomming
730 series. As far as I know there is only WinFast 5400MA avaliable in
Taiwan market.

The second is that, of course we want our whole product line fully supported.
I am personally planing to have full support (i.e. boot from cold power up
without BIOS) for the following combination in the end of August (possible ??)

630/540 single chip + 950 LPC
    620/530 north + 5595 sourth + 6801 SuperIO

so we need somebody to "port" or try the current implementation on these 
different platforms.

Finally, it glad that you are going to visit Taiwan. If you have time,
please arrange to visit SiS and demo your work. We can show you how/what
we have done on LinuxBIOS side.

Ollie
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Information on TIARA project

[Larry G. Linde]

First off it was not easy. We have been working on it since Feb of this
year. We had four very good SW people on it  full time till mid April. Its
been booting cleanly for about 1.5 months now. There are many changes that
we will be posting to SourceForge and opening up our CVS tree for other to
gain access to.

The current version has moved lots of the code into forth. In addition we
have added lots of diags and other support to make Linux support easier.
This also makes it easier to port to the 620/630 arch's We have looked at
the 620 but are not moving to celeron at this time.

We also had a pretty good ICE system to aid in the debug.

Per the 540 we are looking at moving form the 530 to the 540 because the 530
is EOL'ing this year. We are somewhat price
Sensitive, IE: the Socket 7 (amd k6)

If you use the current tiara you can power up the 530/595/6801 currently
with no problem. The only issue we have is on Linux reboot the IDE cache
looks like its not getting flushed. This we are looking into and need to
solve.

We would be curious to get access to the video bios code for the 530. It was
sorta a pain to figure out power up init on the 530. We finally got it
though. As I said before the KBD controller actually caused us the biggest
problem. We did not catch that we had to clear the power up bit in the
rtc/apc register to get the kbd controller to work for a while. (it took a
month to find that silly problem)
Else we would have been booting Linux in mid march.

-larry

-----Original Message-----
From: [e-mail] [mailto:[e-mail]]On Behalf Of
Ollie Lho
Sent: Tuesday, June 20, 2000 7:36 PM
To: Larry G. Linde; [e-mail];
[e-mail]
Subject: Re: Information on TIARA project

"Larry G. Linde" wrote:
> We are working on a 540 design at present and need to start porting to the
> 540/950 chipset.
>
> However we have not been able to find any off the shelf MB's with the 540
> yet. If you could get
> Us the name of a existing 540 MB with the 950 that we could buy that would
> help a lot. Also
> And code/doc info in setup that required on the 540/950 would help as

well.
> If you would like I will be in TW in about 2 weeks. I can stop by and say
> hello and show you
> What we are doing.
>
> -larry

First of all, it is amazing (from our point of view) that without official
support you could do such chip init stuff so clean, how did you do this ??

As you know we are working with FreeBIOS/LinuxBIOS project, we are also
intrested in any similiar projects too. We will provide any support we
can, we will provide you the necessary documents, BIOS source/pseudo code
and hardware demo boards. As posted by Jeff Garzik et. al. on freebios
list we think there is possibility to cooperate/merge these free bios
projects.

For 540+950 issue, there are two things to note. First is that, from
business point of view, it seems that 540 chipset will not in mass
production in the near future so it would be very difficult to find
a 540 M/B in the market. We are rather focusing on 630 and the upcomming
730 series. As far as I know there is only WinFast 5400MA avaliable in
Taiwan market.

The second is that, of course we want our whole product line fully
supported.
I am personally planing to have full support (i.e. boot from cold power up
without BIOS) for the following combination in the end of August (possible
??)

630/540 single chip + 950 LPC
        620/530 north + 5595 sourth + 6801 SuperIO

so we need somebody to "port" or try the current implementation on these
different platforms.

Finally, it glad that you are going to visit Taiwan. If you have time,
please arrange to visit SiS and demo your work. We can show you how/what
we have done on LinuxBIOS side.

Ollie

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Finding FlashROM chips?

[Jeff Garzik]

Can anybody point to a source of flashrom chips on the web?  Preferably
a US supplier since I don't want to ship overseas if I can avoid it..

Jeff

Finding FlashROM chips?

[Ronald G Minnich]

I don't know about the web. I got my flash from bell microproducts in
phoenix (or tucson, I forget).

good service, good turnaround.

ron

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[fb-d] Finding FlashROM chips?

[Mike Panetta]

www.alliedelec.com
www.newark.com

possibly even 
www.avnet.com 
www.radioshack.com (yuk ;)

On Wed, Jun 21, 2000 at 11:05:51AM -0400, Jeff Garzik wrote:
> Can anybody point to a source of flashrom chips on the web?  Preferably
> a US supplier since I don't want to ship overseas if I can avoid it..
>
> Jeff
>
> Freebios-devel mailing list
> [e-mail]
> http://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/freebios-devel

[fb-d] Finding FlashROM chips?

[Ollie Lho]

Jeff Garzik wrote:
> Can anybody point to a source of flashrom chips on the web?  Preferably
> a US supplier since I don't want to ship overseas if I can avoid it..
>     Jeff

Please order Atmel AT29C040A as possible. The flash utility does not work on
AMD 29F040. And SST28SF040 is not tested.

Ollie
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