EPIA Howto Update

[Mark Wilkinson]

Hi Sone,

	Thanks for the comments, looks like an update to the update will be on it's 
way shortly !

On Friday 18 Jul 2003 05:56, SONE Takeshi wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 18, 2003 at 01:29:48AM +0100, Mark Wilkinson wrote:
> > 	Just a quick note to say that I've updated my EPIA howto to include a
> > little section for the brave on enabling the onboard VGA.
> >
> > This is based on Sone Takeshi's work.
> >
> > Thanks to Andrew Ip for committing the update to CVS.
>
> Hi Mark,
> Thank you for your work.
>
> Perhaps everyone already forgets about it, but I was asked by Ron
> for a HOWTO on EPIA+VGA.
> I started it, but it isn't finished. (I was fiddling with BOOT_IDE etc
> to include in my documentation...)
> Now that your HOWTO covers VGA, everything is OK.
>
> Some points...
>
> - Line 37-40:
>     NOTE: At present, the epia can be booted with a serial console. Power
> 	  management to turn off the power is not available, neither is the
> 	  video bios. Memeory is currenly hard coded to report 64M - you must
> 	  have at least this much memory.
>
> You can use video console once VGA is enabled (option VIDEO_CONSOLE=1).
> It isn't very useful however, since VGA initialization is almost at the
> end of LinuxBIOS execution.
> Memory configuration is also fixed already.

Oops, forgot all about the memory configuration being fixed, and I haven't had 
a chance to play with the VIDEO_CONSOLE=1 option yet (old story about not 
being enough hours in the day... :-)

>
> - Line 364-367:
>                 0 - Disable Framebuffer
>                 1 - 1 Mbyte
>                 2 - 2 Mbytes
>                 8 - 8 Mbytes
>
> This is incorrect. Valid values are 2, 4, and 8 (MB).
> To disable framebuffer, remove the option HAVE_FRAMEBUFFER.

Will correct that, although what I can remember from the northbridge docs is 
that a setting of 0 also disables the framebuffer - perhaps this option is 
really a 'have framebuffer, but don't share with it memory option'

>
> Also, now I use folowing lines in the config for the VGA BIOS image to be
> patched in the romimage:
>     option ZKERNEL_START=0xfffc0000
>     option VGABIOS_START=0xfffe0000
>     addaction romimage dd if=/path/to/vgabios.bin of=romimage bs=65536 \
> 	seek=2 conv=sync conv=notrunc
> This way you don't have to handcraft the vga+eb payload.

so this copies the vgabios into the rom image after the payload (not the 
otherway around) doesn't copying 65536 bytes to 0xfffe000 overwrite the 
Linuxbios part of the rom image ? or is that done afterwards, in which case 
the LinuxBIOS would overwrite part of the vgabios image... althought, I think 
the VGA bios is only 48K in size isn't it !

I'll have to try this, just to get my head around what's happening !

Regards
Mark.