"BALBIR SINGH" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > I have started on a new journey to go where no man has > ever gone before (I think). I would like to get LinuxBios > working for a new motherboard I caught hold of.
Sounds right. > I have collected the following information. > > 1. NorthBridge - Intel 845 MCH Similiar to the E7500 (which I am busily polishing) I hope they haven't misplaced your cas timing register as well. They documented a cas latency setting for me and then placed the actual setting in another register > 2. SouthBridge - Intel 82801BA Done, I believe. See: src/southbridge/intel/82801 Grumble, the trailing letters are a significant part of the part number. And there are noticeable changes between the 82801CA on the p4dpr that I am working on now and the 82801BA on the p4dc6. The mtd driver ich2rom should work for the 82801BA. > 3. SuperIO Semtech's SMSC LPC47M192 That is a new one, most probably because it is an LPC part not an ISA part. A numer of their other superio chips are supported which may help. > 4. CPU - single P4 Similiar to the Xeon see cpu/i786 > I am planning to download their programmer's manuals. > > What else would I need to get started? Make certain you have a procedure where you may reflash your chip if you misflash it. If you have a couple of spare chips or a rom burner you should be o.k. > Also, I am a little > concerned, if I screw up and load the wrong image into the > BIOS, how do I recover from such a mistake? Reflashing the rom chip with the original BIOS, and possibly clearing/restoring the CMOS settings. > I would like > to think that flashing a new good image will make things > good again, is that TRUE? It has been for me. My general procedure is. 1) Heavily stress the hardware configuration as built up, so you know you are working with good hardware. 2) Get an mtd driver going so I can flash from the motherboard. 3) Enable the serial port so I can see what I'm doing. 4) Get a hard coded ram initialization routine built. 5) Get enough other pieces working (irq tables etc) so that Linux boots. 6) Get two copies of LinuxBIOS in the rom so I can continue development without swapping rom chips. 7) Generalize the ram setup, so it will handle any kind of DIMM. 8) Make certain the rest of the boards functions work. Just for reference I have a few interesting tools, a POST card, a logic analizer, a ROM burner that I occasionally use. But for the core of the development I use my brain and data sheets, and the board as it sits (plus a few spare rom chips so when I fry by plugging it in backwards to many times I'm not dead in the water :) The ROM burner I only use when I am short on ROM chips. The logical analizer I have only used to verify that the hardware is working as it is documented to. Setting that up to see command on the RAM channel was a challenge. My timing in getting the POST card sucked so I had the serial port going on the last problematic board before I got it in. It is nice to have something that only requires on outb to use. Eric
