[LinuxBIOS] Steps for successsful ram init on i440bx boards

[roger]

On Mon, 2007-05-14 at 14:07 +0800, Yuning Feng wrote:
> 2007/5/14, roger <roger at eskimo.com>:
> > Would it help any if I made a list of items needed for proper Intel
> > northbridge (and possibly southbridge/smbus) initialization?
> 
> This is helpful.
> 
> I think 440bx might be a good mainboard to start learning linuxbios ?
> Datasheets of Intel mainboards are relatively easier to obtain and
> 440bx is easy to get.

The 440BX was a very popular board during the late 90's to early 2000.

Matter of fact, go into any used computer shop, chances are, all the
used computers going cheap all have 440BX boards.

Then came along AMD. :-)


But back to your question.  I've been slowly learning C for the past
 years w/ some other languages under my belt, and I'm finding, yes,
 reading the code for the Intel 440BX board quite easy.

> There have been some tutorial to start, which are mainly on server
> boards. Server boards are more expensive and it seems their datasheets
> are more diffucult to obtain. I feel much more comfort while reading
> code if I have some hardware documentation to refer to. Maybe some day
> we could have a tutorial on widely used and well-documented desktop
> mainboard ?
> 
> Just some humble opinion. Correct me if I am wrong. Thanks.

There's a linuxjournal.com sc520 article explaining their debugging
techniques too.

And, as we go along here, I'll be hopefully documenting my experience
with the 440BX.

--
Roger
http://www.eskimo.com/~roger/index.html
Key fingerprint = 8977 A252 2623 F567 70CD 1261 640F C963 1005 1D61

Sun May 13 23:24:23 PDT 2007