[coreboot] searching volunteer to install coreboot on asus m4a78 pro

[xdrudis]

My setup  is similar to yours, I bought it trying to get easy coreboot
support (easy, not immediate, and also some features), I've spent
some 6 months trying to "install coreboot" and it still does not
boot. But I'm not experienced in low level programming and I don't
have that much spare time to experiment. So don't count on me 
as a volunteer. It's also not something I'd like to do on ssh.
You have to do a lot of trying and exchange one chip for another,
and it's already slighty tiresome if you're there physically, let alone
having to wait for someone on IRC... There's also some risk of breaking something
that I wouldn't like to take.
   
On Thu, Feb 10, 2011 at 04:09:18PM +0100, Jelle de Jong wrote:
> 
> [1] http://debian.pastebin.com/mqphUf5U # details ASUSTeK M4A78 PRO
> 
> Features I would like:
> * Serial Console Redirection

Does your board have a serial port (RS232)?
The photos look a lot like my board. Mine has one but I don't see it in yours

http://www.mail-archive.com/coreboot@coreboot.org/msg24572.html

Try to see the marking on the EPROM chip.
I bet is the small chip on a  
300MIL 8-PDIP socket 
between the red connectors (IDE and SATA ?)
follow that thread in case it is the same chip, 
I finally bought the winbond chips from digikey in June 2010 

Idx  Box Ordered   Cancelled Shipped              Item Number/Description             Back  Unit Price Amount
                                                                                      Order  Euro       Euro
   1   1         3         0         3 W25Q80BVDAIG-ND                                        2.38000     7.14
                                       SPI FLASH 8MBIT 8-DIP
                                       SCHED B: 854232       ECCN: EAR99
                                       LEAD: LEAD FREE                    ROHS: ROHS COMP
                                       COUNTRY/ORIGIN: TAIWAN

And have worked perfectly with flashrom for me all these months.


> * AMD Athlon II X4 615e support

I have a Phenom II X4 910e 
Looks quite similar. Yours is revision RB_C3 also, I think?

I found fidvid.c did not suppport this version and coreboot 
hanged while setting frequency and voltage of the CPU. 
I've apparently fixed it but I have a 1600 lines patch, 
and I really should see how to break it up in chunks that
can be reasonably reviewed . In fact for fidvid.c itself 
the patch is bigger than the file. I hope I can do something 
this weekend to break into decent patches...

My board still doesn't boot though. It currently gets to 
ram stage and hangs while enabling pci devices. It's similar
to a problem I found in romstage and I worked around it with 
a patch that wasn't probably the right approach (it wasn't commited).
This time I'll have to see what's causing it (likely that I have
an RX781, not an RS780, it's more or less the same without 
graphics, but I may have to tweak something somehow). 

> * ECC Memory support

Not sure this works

> * Readout volt,temp,rpm sensors
> * Boot 2.6 kernel support
> * Grub 2 (lvm, mdadm, ext4) support
>

I think this will work 

> I got two M4A78 PRO motherboards that I would like to give new life by
> getting coreboot on them.
> 

New life ? They are not so old as to have died yet...
There're similar boards already that might work:
src/mainboard/asus/m4a785-m
src/mainboard/asus/m4a78-em