[OpenBIOS] Intel holding back information

[Niklas Ekström]

On Thu, 5 Aug 1999, Ron Tsur wrote:
> I provide consulting services to Intel, many times concerning chipsets.  I am
> bound by non-disclosure agreement so I could not provide you with any
> information that you cannot receive by other means.  However, Intel does not
> want to hide information regarding released chipsets, only to protect
> pre-release products.  I believe that the best avenue for you is to request a
> developer CD-ROM subscription, which is free of charge, if you qualify and
> includes regular quarterly updates.  refer to Developers' Insight CD-ROM at 

This is annoying. Do you think that I'm actually that stupid that I
haven't retrieved the information that is freely available from Intel
before I write something like this to this mailinglist?

Ofcourse I have the Developer Insight cdroms and also have got printed
books with datasheets from Intel as well as printed out those chipset
datasheets not in those books.

But what I want is the BIOS specificatons for the chipsets, which is
released under a NDA so you can't just download them from Intel's website
(I can't believe you missed that if you read my original posting).

Also if you would actually have read my original mail, you would know that
I already have been in contact with Intel and that they are unwilling to
give out these specifications (and it's not a pre-release product, the
430FX chipset is from '96).

I know for sure that there is information in the BIOS specification that I
would want when writing the BIOS (an Intel Support Engineer told me so
(she also told me the ordering number for the 430FX BIOS spec 2.2 is 
FM0704)). For example, nowhere in the chipset datasheet it says how you
should do to find out how much RAM there is in each row, so you can
program the DRBs (DRAM Row Boundry registers).

So stop giving me useless advice like "dude, perhaps if you learn
assembler, i've heard that's great.. and visit developer.intel.com"
and come up with a good idea on how to obtain the information in the
BIOS specifications!

Btw, couldn't anyone that works as a BIOS engineer over at Intel send
these specs (by mistake ofcourse) over to me?  ;-)

/ Niklas

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