Dirtball is our SiS630 test node. We call it that because it was put together
with a brand new SiS630 motherboard and whatever junk we happened to have on
hand. It's kind of a gross looking machine. But it works beautifully for testing
and development. Here's dirtball:
Dirtball mainboard. The flash rom is in the upper left, as are the power switch
and reset connectors. You can see this is a beautiful compact little mainboard,
and it supports both socket 370 and Slot I. There is a green heatsink just visible
under the Pentium II heatsink -- this is the SiS 630 chip. This chip supports
many functions, including graphics, north and south bridges, USB, IDE, Ethernet,
and so on. SDRAM clocks at up to 133 Mhz. One limitation: no 64-bit PCI.
Address line 18 patch. We had to patch A18 from the SiS630 chip to the flash ram. This involved adding a jumper and removing a zero-ohm resistor. It's a sloppy job because I don't have the right kind of soldering tool for this work -- I hope to fix that soon!
You can see the patch: it's the yellow wire that goes from the motherboard, loops over the SiS chip, and then goes in between the contact rows on the DIP socket.
You can also see the power switch wire (blue and white TP). Right next to
this wire are the two contacts for the reset switch -- more on this later.
Elegant sheetmetal work. The mainboard has an AT-style keyboard connector,
and the Gateway box had a newer connector. A little sheet metal trim and voila!
a nice big hole for the connector.
In this picture you can see the 630 boot from power on. The kernel is up so
fast that the IDE drive isn't ready, and so doesn't probe. The result is the
kernel has no root to mount from. We're working on a fix for going too fast.
To boot the 630 right now, you have to turn it on, let it fail to boot as above, reset it, and then let it boot. This allows the IDE time to spin up. There is no handy reset switch on dirtball, so we have to short the two pins together on the motherboard that do a reset. For that we need a conductive piece of metal ("reset device") to short the pins.
This is our hi-tech reset device. You may have seen it if you own any valinux
nodes. It is the clip used to hold in the PCI cards.
Here's a successful boot of dirtball.
VALinux node. One Pentium is higher than the other since it is connected to
the American Arium Test Access Probe (TAP). You can see the Arium box on its
side to the left. The floppy is used to load new NVRAM images of LinuxBIOS.
The LCD monitor sitting in back is what LinuxBIOS displays on. We have a Matrox
Millenium card in for display since the on-board hardware doesn't work under
/dev/fb (yet). An interesting thing to note is how much less integrated this
mainboard is than the SiS. About five or so of the big chips on this card are
integrated into the one SiS 630 chip.
