If you are using ATest boards, please read this message carefully. In the early conversion to LinuxBIOS, we found a hardware problem. This is good: it is the purpose of testing.
To meet demand of high volume components that may be in short supply sometimes, such as DRAM, it is normal to "qualify" a number of sources for those components. The ATest boards were therefore manufactured with three different DRAM vendor's chips. Unfortunately, a mistake was made in the selection of the proper component from Infineon, and a DRAM chip version was used that is too slow for the Geode GX. This is not a problem with Infineon's memory chips; the wrong speed chip was used by mistake, rather than the parts themselves not working to specification. Therefore, as the warning in the "Upgrading to LinuxBIOS" page says in more detail: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Upgrading_to_LinuxBIOS#Warnings please do *NOT* install LinuxBIOS right now onto boards with Infineon DRAM's, but wait until we say to. We will probably make a version of LinuxBIOS for use on such boards that sets the memory controller slow enough for those boards to work as well as they have under Insyde's BIOS, which we believe was running at the slower speed. But that slower speed, which is as slow as the Geode GX can run, is still nominally too fast for the memory chips used. We are working on a strategy of how to handle this issue, though clearly most boards have been stable at this slower speed (or we would have had many complaints by now). If you have already converted to LinuxBIOS on boards with the Infineon memory, and your board appears to be working OK, leave it alone for now and continue to run LinuxBIOS. Please *DO* continue to install LinuxBIOS onto boards you have with Hynix or PSC memory chips. We do need to test both LinuxBIOS and the use of those manufacturer's memory chips at the higher intended speed. Thank you all for your efforts! - Jim Gettys My great thanks to Tom Sylla, Ron Minnich, Richard Smith, Jordan Crouse, Chris Ball, Marcelo Tosatti, James Cameron and Mitch Bradley for helping figure out this problem. This problem is: http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/53 -- Jim Gettys One Laptop Per Child _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.laptop.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
