[coreboot] ASRock E350M1: Boot delay with debug enabled, system RAM reported incorrectly in Linux

[Marshall Buschman]

On 06/19/2011 02:17 AM, Marshall Buschman wrote:
> On 06/19/2011 01:38 AM, Scott Duplichan wrote:
>> Marshall Buschman wrote:
>>
>> ]Hello:
>> ]
>> ]With Scott's work on PCIe support for the E350M1, the NIC and USB3 are
>> ]now working -- Thanks Scott!
>>
>> Thanks for testing it on both the boards. Good to hear it works.
>>
>> ]The remaining problems that I know of are:
>> ]
>> ]1) Enabling coreboot serial debugging slows system boot 
>> dramatically: 5min+
>> ]Someone mentioned in IRC that this is because we are attempting to 
>> write
>> ]to the serial device before it is ready, which causes some kind of
>> ]timeout/backoff/retry sequence. How can I help with this?
>>
>> That is weird. The log file you sent is 38819 bytes. I would expect the
>> boot time penalty to be not much more than the I/O time of 38819 bytes /
>> (11520 bytes/second) = 3.37 seconds. I did a test with loglevel 8. It 
>> logged
>> 45745 bytes and the boot time from cold reset to DOS prompt was 5.56
>> seconds. When I watch the serial output, it spews text nearly 
>> continuously.
>> There is no hardware or software handshaking for the writes, so nothing
>> should slow it down.
>>
>> ]2) System RAM is reported incorrectly. In linux, "free -m" reports 
>> 480mb
>> ]of total RAM -- the full total is 4gb.
>>
>> I see, I had tested only a small memory configuration so far. It looks
>> like any size greater than 4GB will fail. Try the attached patch.
> Works great, 3.5gb of available RAM. I've submitted it into the review 
> system.
>> Thanks,
>> Scott
>>
> Thanks again!
> -Marshall
>
>
Okay, There's something odd going on here. Now the NIC is gone. I'm 
going to investigate in the morning and abandon the change in gerrit 
until I know what's going on.
-Marshall