[OpenBIOS] Re: [fb-d] question for the experts on PII vs. Celeron startup

Ollie Lho ollie at sis.com.tw
Thu May 25 14:32:21 CEST 2000


Ronald G Minnich wrote:
> 
> I have been having trouble getting PII to work with memory from powerup. I
> just now realized that I'm seeing basically the same problem on the Intel
> and SiS motherboards. Engineers at SiS, using the same linuxbios romimage
> as I am using, has no troubles on the motherboard BUT: they are using
> Celeron. (see the linuxbios web page: I can still get the intel
> motherboard up with linuxbios, but I have to let the flash recovery code
> run first by twiddling the jumper).
> 

Sorry, Ron, but you probably got some misunderstanding of the situation here SiS.
We are using PII processors as you (??) but the M/B are different. The M/B send
to you was made by some infamous OEM, an the M/B tested here was what the real
"demo board" made in-house.

> The symptom is that during memory init, at some point the processor seems
> to take a trap during a memory write. It is as though some piece of
> hardware between the processor and memory is unhappy :-)
> 
> I'm working with SiS to try a different motherboard. But: I'm now
> wondering if I'm encountering some kind of PII L2 Cache init problem on
> the Slot 1 cards I'm using here. I'm very suspicious that I'm seeing a
> particular kind of problem on my Slot 1 PII systems that SiS is not seeing
> using a Celeron, and that I'm seeing the same kind of problem on both
> Intel and SiS mainboards.
> 
> Any comments on this? Any thoughts? Anyone know if anything special
> happens for L2 cache on a Slot 1 card at powerup? It would probably look
> like an IN or OUT to an undocumented address (undocumented since this is
> Intel we're talking about here).
> 

We can reach some point in intel_main.c on our M/B with all DRAM correctly
sized/detected, so it probably not an undocumented CPU thing but an undocumentd,
screw-up M/B thing.

Anyway, we will send you the M/B with DIMM we are testing to you, of course,
the flash rom and the romimage "pre-installed" too.

After that we will purchase TWO identical M/B made by LeadTek (WinFast 6300MA),
DIMM, flash rom, one for each of us. The M/B is only avaliable in Socket 370,
so we are asking you if it is O.K.

Ollie
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