[coreboot] Seabios - VGA & Boot From First Hard Drive Issues

[Roger]

On Sat, Jan 01, 2011 at 12:45:16AM -0500, Kevin O'Connor wrote:
>On Fri, Dec 31, 2010 at 04:02:09PM -0900, Roger wrote:
>> On Fri, Dec 31, 2010 at 11:37:52AM -0500, Kevin O'Connor wrote:
>> >On Fri, Dec 31, 2010 at 01:54:04AM -0900, Roger wrote:
>> >> And still getting better here.
>> >> 
>> >> I've reset some Seabios config.h options to defaults and disabled FLOPPY
>> >> options.
>> >
>> >The floppy options have no impact on seabios when in coreboot mode.
>> >What you're seeing here is likely random failures.  You should try
>> >running the memtest program.
>> 
>> Yup.  Figured-out, the user is required to press "F12" else Seabios will try to
>> load a floppy image as defined in milliseconds within config.h.
>
>Hrmm - Seabios wont load from floppy under coreboot.  The floppy
>hardware support is disabled when on coreboot.  The messages you are
>seeing are harmless.
>
>> If Seabios doesn't find a floppy image or boot image, it will then reload
>> coreboot/reboot as defined in milliseconds within config.h.  (This I find nuts,
>> Seabios infinitely reloading coreboot over & over again.  Is this correct?
>> Great stress testing though as I can see additional reloads fail sometime over
>> time due to raminit issues.)
>> 
>> I prefer Seabios to sit and wait forever (an unlimited amount of time).
>> 
>> Also, if I do get things going correctly, would prefer Seabios just go ahead
>> and boot the bootable drive partition (or main boot record... with grub/lilo
>> installed).  If anything, a slight pause might be essential in case a user does
>> have a floppy image installed or chooses network, usb, etc.
>
>If SeaBIOS fails to find a boot method, it will wait infinitely.
>You're seeing an unrelated failure here.

Wooh.  Then the timeout here:

#define CONFIG_BOOTMENU_WAIT 2500

... is only a wait before booting the default (floppy) image and Seabios should not
be rebooting coreboot?  Because if so, I'm getting an endless reboot after
failure to boot the floppy image.

Well anyways, I've pretty much gotten both my 440BX (Tyan 1832dl using Tyan
1846 mainboard and DFI P2BX using Asus P2B mainboard) working.  Just raminit
seems to be spawning random bugs.

It's really nice to see these old 440BX boards being able to boot from USB pen
disks!
-- 
Roger
http://rogerx.freeshell.org/