[LinuxBIOS] m57sli : debugging the flashrom problem when booting with LB

[Florentin Demetrescu]

Hi all,

I started working on this problem this week and there are some strange things I
have found so far.
First, the behaviour I noticed when starting flashrom after booting whith LB :
 1) flashrom needs to be given the board type in command line parameter (-m
gigabyte:m57sli) otherwise it is unable to recognize this board. On the other
hand it seems to correctly recognize the SB type (mcp55) and the SIO too
(it8716). It seems that it succeeds in reading and writting the configuration
registers of the SIO (those accesible through the 0x2e - 0x2f pair of IO ports)
at least..
 2) the real problem is that it hangs when trying to access the SPI interface of
the SIO, more precisely when pooling the "busy flag" of the configuration
register of the SPI interface before sending a SPI command, normally mapped at
the 0x820 IO address. Indeed when dumping the value which is read @ this
address, one get a value 0xff! It doesn't seem to me that this register should
have normally this value, there seem to be a problem with the decoding of this
IO address range into the mcp55 SB very probably..
 3) the most strange thing is that when probing with an oscilloscope the SPI
signals, there _IS_ indeed a burst of activity on the CLK line when executing
flashrom. Some code into flashrom seems to generate this activity, but I haven't
found so far where it is triggerd. But from the flashrom point of view there is
no reponse from the spi interface so it hangs..

Rudolf Marek suggested after an irc discussion that there could be problems with
the GPIO configuration, but I don't think so, because if that would be the case
then we couldn't access the SIO at all and the platform wouldn't boot at all
with LB. But who knows? Rudolf, can you be more specific about this GPIO
hypothesis?..
For my part I continue to think that there is a problem with the IO address
decoding into the PCI->LPC bridge in mcp55.. Yinghai, can you help please?

Regards,
 Florentin