The wiki is being retired!

Documentation is now handled by the same processes we use for code: Add something to the Documentation/ directory in the coreboot repo, and it will be rendered to https://doc.coreboot.org/. Contributions welcome!

Before you begin

The Asus A8N-E is a Athlon64 Socket 939 board (nforce 4 ultra) with socketed BIOS sold around 120 (mostly out of stock in 8/2007) (used items at ebay ~ 20-35 possible). It already boots LinuxBIOS. Latest legacy BIOS is from May 2006 v.1013. Socket 939 Athlons do not have Pacifica Virtualization.

The plcc32 BIOS chip is of type SST 49LF004B of which you need a spare pre-programmed piece.

A8N-sli deluxe, an "nforce 4 sli" board probably shares the same pcb design with more solder pads populated (pls cnfirm), and is also out of stock mostly. Supporting more recent A8N boards is considered, but there is no confirmation about any one already finished. A8NE-FM/S has initial support in the source tree. Biostar NF4-A9A (socket 939) also has ITE 8712F i/o and CK804 chips as the ASUS and is still being sold around 35.

Hot plugging a BIOS chip was successfully done (pull out chip with glued-on handle while running Linux), so you don't necessarily need an external eprom programmer, just a spare working 49LF004.

8 MBit SST 49LF080A was also successfully flashed and booted with legacy BIOS (two images concatenated).

known issues

currently PS/2 keyboards do not work, but USB keyboards do.

single DIMM support only

The MAC address is stored in flash for almost all CK804/MCP55 boards. All of these boards flashed with LB probably have the same MAC address. See src/southbridge/nvidia/ck804/romstrap.inc and src/southbridge/nvidia/mcp55/romstrap.inc for details. On some of these boards, the MAC address is stored in a separate EEPROM, but you can't count on that.

Payload

Building the payload

Your menu.list entry

Current status of the LBv2 tree

Building LinuxBIOS

Burning LinuxBIOS

Running LinuxBIOS

Help?

TODO

If you can help out with this, please join the mailing list and let us know!

This work is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or any later version. This work is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

Board:asus/a8n e