[LinuxBIOS] supermicro/h8dmr port, vga

[Ward Vandewege]

Hi Patrick,

On Fri, May 04, 2007 at 02:23:27PM -0700, Patrick McMurchie wrote:
> I have a few questions about the supermicro/h8dmr linuxBIOS port in
> specific, and the process for enabling vga support in general. Apologies
> if these questions are too noobish in nature.

Don't worry about that. There are no stupid questions - only stupid answers
:)

> I can successfully extract the VGA ROM from a supermicro h8dmr-i2 using
> either /dev/mem with offsets obtained from /proc/iomem, or via amideco.
> Both methods yield files of the same size, but diff reports a
> difference. 

I've just tried extracting the VGA rom from the downloadable BIOS, and got a
44KB image. I would probably try that one first - sometimes there is
strangeness when trying to recover the VGA rom from a running system.

> Since I wasn't sure about which one to use. I've alternately
> prepended both images to an appropriate linuxbios.rom. Regardless of
> which VGA ROM is used, the machine fails to boot (fans spin up for a
> moment, then stop, no serial or vga output) after I flash the resultant
> image. When configured to use serial console, without the VGA ROM, the
> system boots and works as expected.
> 
> Something I've been wondering about is the "option ROM_SIZE" entry in
> the target's Config.lb: The VGA ROM is 44kB, and the SST Flash chip is
> 1024kB, but when I set ROM_SIZE to (1024*1024)-(44*1024) or 1003520, the
> final concatenated ROM weighs in at 1020kB, which flashrom will refuse
> to write. If instead I pad ROM_SIZE by 4kB, making it 1007616, I get a
> 1MB which flashrom will accept. Am I doing something silly here, or has
> anyone else seen this behavior?

Hmmm, this is strange, and perhaps the cause of the problem. I've just built
the h8dmr target with ROM_SIZE set to 1003520, and the image it generated was
exactly that size. So I'm not seeing this behavior here, in other words.
Prepending the VGA rom gives me an image that is exactly 1024KB, as expected.
I can't test it of course since I don't have the hardware :)

I guess my first question is, are you building from the main LinuxBIOS V2
tree, or from the patches that Yinghai sent to the list months ago? You
should work from the tree, since Yinghai's MCP55 patch is now sufficiently
merged.

> Per the VGA Howto, I've un-commented the appropriate device section in
> src/mainboard/supermicro/h8dmr/Config.lb, 

I was looking at that file, and I'm not sure what you had to un-comment?
Nothing was marked as VGA.

> and enabled both
> CONFIG_CONSOLE_VGA and CONFIG_PCI_ROM_RUN in the target's Config.lb.

Yeah, those are enabled by default in the tree.

Thanks,
Ward.

-- 
Ward Vandewege <ward at gnu.org>