[LinuxBIOS] different versions of the GA-M57SLI-S4 (PLCC vs SPI)

echelon at free.fr echelon at free.fr
Wed Sep 12 03:11:19 CEST 2007


Hi all,

 Finaly a little victory with the SPI version of the GA-M57SLI-S4 board..
 It works!!!
 LinuxBIOS + FILO as payload work (almost) "out of the box" on the spi revision
of the card, i.e. I didn't make any changes to the source tree used to generate
the rom image.
 But some issues remain:
  -1) no support in flashrom for spi chips. I used a home made spi programmer
(with a Altera FPGA) to flash the rom image. I "socketised" also the flash chip
and the mainboard.
  -2) I managed to boot a Linux with LB (a pretty old Debian distro with a 2.4
kernel). No VGA display at all! I had to use a serial console to display the LB
logs and then to log in into Linux. BTW my graphics adapter was a old PCI
graphics card.
  -3) I tried to install a network card too (PCI also). When booting with the
factory bios image (Award) it works well, lspci shows both the graphics adapter
and the ethernet one. But when booting with LB, these 2 items don't appear
anymore into the lspci scan.. It looks to me that the PCI bridge is not
correctly initialized into the SB : am I wrong or not on this issue?

 That's the first assessement I can make for my work with this motherboard for
the moment. Now I will try to add support for SPI flash and ITE8716 superio in
flashrom (I have never done that before, it will be hard for me!..). Btw, is
someone else working with this board at this moment or am I alone?.. I would
like to avoid to do unusefull work..

 Finaly another finding I made:
  - the board comes with a 512 KiB flash chip. I tried to use a 1 MiB flash chip
and it works! But I had to duplicate the linuxbios.rom image (cat lb.rom lb.rom
> lb2.rom) to generate a bigger image suitable for this bigger flash.

That's all folks..
  Florentin




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