[LinuxBIOS] different versions of the GA-M57SLI-S4 (PLCC vs SPI)

Peter Stuge peter at stuge.se
Wed Sep 12 02:52:17 CEST 2007


On Wed, Sep 12, 2007 at 03:11:19AM +0200, echelon at free.fr wrote:
>  Finaly a little victory with the SPI version of the GA-M57SLI-S4
> board..
>  It works!!!

Great to hear. Glad you can confirm they didn't do too much to change
it.


>  But some issues remain:
>   -1) no support in flashrom for spi chips. I used a home made spi
> programmer (with a Altera FPGA) to flash the rom image. I
> "socketised" also the flash chip and the mainboard.

Can you confirm or reject the theory for adding a switch?

How did you do the socket?


> No VGA display at all!

Did you include the VGA BIOS in your LB image and enable VGA in
Config.lb?


>   -3) I tried to install a network card too (PCI also). When
> booting with the factory bios image (Award) it works well, lspci
> shows both the graphics adapter and the ethernet one. But when
> booting with LB, these 2 items don't appear anymore into the lspci
> scan..

Does LB find them? Can you show us lspci from factory BIOS and full
serial output from the LB boot?


> It looks to me that the PCI bridge is not correctly initialized
> into the SB : am I wrong or not on this issue?

That could be it. Maybe they changed enough to make the board's
Config.lb invalid.


> Now I will try to add support for SPI flash and ITE8716 superio in
> flashrom (I have never done that before, it will be hard for
> me!..). Btw, is someone else working with this board at this moment
> or am I alone?.. I would like to avoid to do unusefull work..

Carl-Daniel was going to have a look at it when he got back online
unless someone else did it first.

flashrom has no support at all for the SPI way of flashing so I would
just do a massive hack for the first round of SPI support.


>  Finaly another finding I made:
>   - the board comes with a 512 KiB flash chip. I tried to use a 1
> MiB flash chip and it works! But I had to duplicate the
> linuxbios.rom, image (cat lb.rom lb.rom > lb2.rom) to generate a
> bigger image suitable for this bigger flash.

Yep - I would expect that to work. Cool.


//Peter




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