EPIA-M "Magic Potion"?

[John Laur]

Greetings, everyone. I am fairly new to LinuxBIOS, having fooled with it
for only a couple of days. Needless to say, I've been learning a lot. I
have had a lot of success with this great project, but recently have
been meeting with some failures as well. I'm searching for the "Magic
Potion" of CVS checkout date, patches, and config file that makes it
work for me, even if only passably, until the v2 port can proceed and
the VGA issues can be re-addressed.

I am trying to use a VIA EPIA M-1000 (Ezra) board and I'm having limited
success that at this point, I cannot decide are problems with my
LinuxBIOS configuration/build or problems with the code I am using. I
was able to successfully build and run LinuxBIOS with the serial console
and using FILO or etherboot (via-rhine and ide-disk) payloads without. I
am building code from a current (Mar. 25, 2004) v1 cvs checkout.

1) The machine has 512MB SDRAM, but LinuxBIOS only sets up 128MB. Is
this a problem with my config file? I know that v1 has some limitations
with memory on this platform. Was there a time when this worked better
on epia-m?

2) I cannot for the life of me flash the BIOS under Linux. For now, I
have to reboot to a DOS floppy and flash the original BIOS, then reboot
again and flash the LinuxBIOS image (AWFLASH will for some reason not
flash a LinuxBIOS image over a LinuxBIOS image already on the flash
part) I have run 'setpci -s 0:11.0  40.b=54' as described in the docs
and on the mailing list, but flash_rom still detects no flash device.

3) Despite my sincerest efforts, VGA is doing nothing. I have extracted
the VGA bios from both /proc/kcore as described in the HOWTO and from a
ROM image using CBROM (padded to 64k).. neither of these work. The VGA
bios I'm trying is from the latest release of the BIOS from VIA.

I understand that some people are having success on epia-m/vga using a
checkout from last july and a patch from Dave Ashley.. I may have
mistakenly believed that all that made it into CVS, but if not, what is
the correct checkout date, and where can I find the patch?

Thanks in advance to the list for any assistance!

John Laur