On Wed, 5 Sep 2001, John P. Looney wrote:
> Um...I assume they aren't hot swap. If I mess up, and I'm left with a
> dead bios, how to I flash a fixed one on ? I assume I do need a eeprom
> programmer. So...where do I get one ?
Well... it is "hot swap" more or less - just put a ZIF socket in the
normal BIOS socket, then carefully replace the BIOS once you're ready to
burn. Read the SiS HOWTO for more info and legal disclaimers :)
[though the SiS howto talks about burning DoC - you'll need to find
appropriate software for flashing a BIOS on the BX board...]
Alternatively... the cheapest programmer I found ($150) is
http://www.xtronics.com/memory/EPROM.htm - it's a parallel port programmer
with software for DOS/Win98. I don't have one (yet) but it claims to
support 29Fxxx 39SFxxx 49FXXX flash parts (and I know people are using it
to successfully flash 29F040's) If you are willing to spend more there
are a ton of others.
> 170k+ for the 2.4.7 SiS patch. It seems to be mainly power management and
> setup stuff. If people have it working on BX previously, this patch (for
> older versions of the kernel, maybe) must have been done before...yes ?
Actually, I think the bulk of the SiS patch is the rewritten sisfb driver
by Ollie, plus some SiS-specific reset code. The part you may want it for
is the code to force the IDE drives on and wait for the drives to spin up
(if you are using IDE). If not, I don't think you need it. Though there
is a small patch in there for a PCI IRQ fix, you may want to look at
that...
-Jake
