On Sat, 2005-12-03 at 13:06 -0600, Richard Smith wrote: > > there any point in trying to just get the chipset specs from VIA (it's a > > KT600 NB and a VT8237 SB), or are there things that need to be done > > specifically for the motherboard so that the chipset specs are useless > > It depends on what MSI did with the board. Most northbridges have > GPIO on them. If MSI did something funky with the SM bus it could be > hard to figure out how to turn on the RAM. > But not impossible. In most cases the motherboard is simply close > copy of the reference design from the chipset mfg. So if you can get > a copy of the chipset docs and perhaps the reference design from via > then you would at least have a place to get started. Most of that > involves an NDA though. So then you would need permission to release > the code based on the NDA material.
That's good to know. At least I know that there's a possibility, providing that VIA decides to play nice. > > by themselves, apart from the flash memory (which isn't supported > > either)? > > You mean that it doesn't have the ability to program the flash on > board? Because from a read viewpoint there is no difference. Any > flash part that meets the same timing and pinout as the part that's > already on the board will work. You just need a programmer to change > things. Well, it would be kind of nice to not have to fork out money on a programmer if I can do it from the host system, though. Maybe I can use MSI's firmware programmer with a LinuxBIOS image? > > I'm more than willing to do the porting work myself, but I'd like to > > know where I could start, and if it's at all possible without the MB > > specs. > > With chipset docs only yes its possible. But the level of effort may > be really large. The docs are going to get you most of the way there > but there's probably going to be things that aren't documented and you > will probably have to boot under the COTS bios and look at how the > registers are set. > > In the extreme case you would need to run the COTS bios under an > emulator to watch the mem read/writes and IOs. Look at your chipset > docs and then modify the emulator to appear to be fake hardware and > study how to twiddle the registers depending on what values your fake > hardware provided. You can't disassemble the COTS bios and figure it > out for legal reasons. Are you sure? I can't remember signing a license for the BIOS code, in which case I should be allowed to read and study it. > If you can't get the chipset docs though its really not worth it. > Find a MB that has docs available. If it turns out that I'd have to pay for a flash programmer, that just might be a better option. On the one hand, I don't want to give up on this just MSI is being evil, but then on the other hand, it isn't nice to be using products from such a company, so that just might be the tipping over the edge. Thank you very much for the info! Fredrik Tolf -- LinuxBIOS mailing list LinuxBIOS@openbios.org http://www.openbios.org/mailman/listinfo/linuxbios
