[coreboot] Motherboard supported? MSI MS-6541

Uwe Hermann uwe at hermann-uwe.de
Fri Oct 16 12:17:23 CEST 2009


Hi,

On Thu, Oct 15, 2009 at 02:19:58PM +0200, Rik v. A wrote:
> We are doing a university project in our spare time. For this we have
> a few desktop machines in which we need support for multiple VGA
> cards. The machines we have only support one VGA card at the time. The
> BIOS won't assign IRQs for any additional VGA cards, so we would like
> to try Coreboot.
> 
> Following is our system's information following the FAQ questions
> (http://www.coreboot.org/FAQ#Will_coreboot_work_on_my_machine.3F)
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> 
> 1) Compaq Evo D310 desktop: MSI MS-6541 motherboard. CPU:  Intel(R)
> Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.40GHz. Chipset: Intel 82801

82801DB* (ICH4*) actually (see lspci), 82801 is too generic.


> 2)
> # lspci -tvnn
> -[0000:00]-+-00.0  Intel Corporation 82845G/GL[Brookdale-G]/GE/PE DRAM

Northbridge is i845, which is not yet supported, so supporting the board
is not trivial. We have to add i845 (RAM init and other stuff) support
first. This might happen sooner or later, but if you want to use
coreboot on some hardware very soon I recommend getting an
already-supported board.


> Controller/Host-Hub Interface [8086:2560]
>            +-01.0-[0000:01]----00.0  nVidia Corporation NV5M64 [RIVA
> TNT2 Model 64/Model 64 Pro] [10de:002d]
>            +-1d.0  Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM
> (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) USB UHCI Controller #1 [8086:24c2]

ICH4 is supported in the i82801xx code, that part it OK.


> 3)
> Presumably Super/IO:
> 
> Winbond W39V040FAP

This is the BIOS chip rather.


> SMSC
> LPC47b367-NC

This one is the Super I/O. No support per se (and I can't find a
datasheet at the moment), but most important here is that we can
enable serial COM ports in the Super I/O, which we should be able
to guess and test based on other SMSC Super I/Os.



> 4)
> # flashrom -V
[...]
> Found chip "Winbond W39V040FA" (512 KB) at physical address 0xfff80000.
> ===
> This flash part has status UNTESTED for operations: PROBE READ ERASE WRITE
> Please email a report to flashrom at coreboot.org if any of the above operations
> work correctly for you with this flash part. Please include the full output
> from the program, including chipset found. Thank you for your help!
> ===

You BIOS chip is detected by flashrom, though it's marked as untested in
your flashrom version (which seems to be pretty old, please update to
latest svn if possible).

Whether or not writing the chip in this board will actually work cannot
be said easily, you'll have to test that (make sure you have a working
backup chip before doing that).
 

Uwe.
-- 
http://www.hermann-uwe.de  | http://www.randomprojects.org
http://www.crazy-hacks.org | http://www.unmaintained-free-software.org




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