[OpenBIOS] Platform for the OPENBIOS question

[Stefan Reinauer]

* Ronald G Minnich <rminnich at lanl.gov> [010821 21:00]:
> yep, that's what we all want. But you're going to have to pick one to
> start.
>
> You might want to try the SiS 630E based mainboards, since both Tiara and
> linuxbios run on those. So we understand the issues.

I thought about getting a new development machine at home pretty soon and
I saw that the Gigabyte GA-7DXR has dual bios functionality, but until
now I was not able to detect the second flash chip with /dev/bios :-(
(Has anyone specs for this?) This would probably make it a perfect test
machine since you can switch back and forth between the firmwares.
Otoh, it might be wiser not to use an almost bleeding edge chipset to do 
this on :)

> > No, AFAIK it will be targeted to be Open Firmware compliant, and
> > therefore working on different archs.
> 
> that doesn't make any sense to me. the arch has nothing to do with open
> firmware compliance.

No, but as Open Firmware has a (for my taste) very clean concept and clear
defined handling of endianesses and register sizes including 64bit/32bit
compatibility, this should make it easier, once we have a working low level 
startup code.

BTW, does the DS10 you used for your tests have a socketed flash? We have two
here, but both have soldered SMD flash roms. Unfortunately, I did a mistake
when I was flashing LinuxBIOS the last time. As they only do in rom FSB,
there's no way out except calling compaq service.

Are there any sis 630 boards you can recommend? As LinuxBIOS supports loading
ELF images over network now, I'd like to stay away from using DOC parts.

I read your statement that sdram is not supported by linuxbios at the moment.
Is this (still) true? I have an old NMC (Enmic) board running an AMD K6-2
on an older Via Apollo (I think it's MVP3) chipset at home. But when I tried
to adopt the support for Via chipsets in linuxbios to that chipset (as far 
as I saw, most registers are the same on that one) the efforts only resulted
in a triple fault reboot from the CPU. Unfortunately this board only has
SDRAM slots. What is the exact problem with SDRAM (please forgive the stupid
manner of this question ;) )

  Best regards
      Stefan

-- 
Mad, adj.:
        Affected with a high degree of intellectual independence.
                -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
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