ASUS A8N-E

ASUS A8N-E, rev. 2.00

This HOWTO explains how to use coreboot on the ASUS A8N-E board.

Status

Device/functionality	Status	Comments
CPU
CPU works	OK	Tested: AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3000+.
L1 cache enabled	OK	CPU: L1 I Cache: 64K (64 bytes/line), D cache 64K (64 bytes/line)
L2 cache enabled	OK	CPU: L2 Cache: 512K (64 bytes/line)
L3 cache enabled	N/A
Multiple CPU support	N/A
Multi-core support	Untested
Hardware virtualization	N/A
RAM
EDO	N/A
SDRAM	N/A
SO-DIMM	N/A
DDR	OK	Tested with one DIMM in slot DIMM_B1 (see manual).
DDR2	N/A
DDR3	N/A
Dual channel support	Untested
ECC support	Untested	The board supports ECC according to the manual.
On-board Hardware
On-board IDE 3.5"	OK	Tested: Primary IDE (master and slave) and secondary IDE (master and slave).
On-board IDE 2.5"	N/A
On-board SATA	WIP	Port 3 (hde in FILO) and 4 (hdg in FILO) on the board work fine. Port 1 and 2 don't seem to work, this is being investigated.
On-board SCSI	Unknown
On-board USB	OK	Tested: USB keyboard (on each of the 10 possible USB ports).
On-board VGA	N/A
On-board ethernet	OK
On-board audio	Untested
On-board modem	N/A
On-board FireWire	N/A
On-board smartcard reader	N/A
On-board CompactFlash	N/A
On-board PCMCIA	N/A
Add-on slots/cards
ISA add-on cards	N/A
Audio/Modem-Riser (AMR/CNR) cards	N/A
PCI add-on cards	OK	Tested: PCI VGA card in all three PCI slots.
Mini-PCI add-on cards	Unknown
PCI-X add-on cards	Unknown
AGP graphics cards	N/A
PCI Express x1 add-on cards	Untested
PCI Express x2 add-on cards	N/A
PCI Express x4 add-on cards	Untested
PCI Express x8 add-on cards	N/A
PCI Express x16 add-on cards	Untested
PCI Express x32 add-on cards	N/A
HTX add-on cards	N/A
Legacy / Super I/O
Floppy	Untested
Serial port 1 (COM1)	OK
Serial port 2 (COM2)	N/A
Parallel port	OK	Tested: modprobe ppdev, further tests were not performed.
PS/2 keyboard	WIP	Doesn't seem to work yet, this is being investigated.
PS/2 mouse	WIP	Doesn't seem to work yet, this is being investigated.
Game port	Untested
Infrared	N/A
PC speaker	OK
DiskOnChip	N/A
Miscellaneous
Sensors / fan control	OK	Tested: sensors reports K8 core temp. (kernel module k8temp) and various other values from the IT8712F Super I/O (kernel module it87).
Hardware watchdog	N/A
SMBus	Unknown
CAN bus	N/A
CPU frequency scaling	No	Needs (at least partial) ACPI support.
Other powersaving features	N/A
ACPI	No	There's no ACPI implementation for this board.
Reboot	OK
Poweroff	No
Suspend	Unknown
Nonstandard LEDs	OK	There's a green LED on the board which is enabled when the board is powered-on. Works out of the box, no special coreboot support required.
High precision event timers (HPET)	Untested	Doesn't seem to be enabled right now, but the hardware seems to support it.
Random number generator (RNG)	N/A
Wake on modem ring	Untested
Wake on LAN	N/A	The on-board ethernet device doesn't seem to support WOL (also not mentioned in the manual).
Wake on keyboard	Untested
Wake on mouse	Untested
Flashrom	OK	Works fine when booted with BIOS and also with coreboot.

Before you begin

The ASUS A8N-E is an Athlon64 Socket 939 board (nforce 4 ultra) with socketed BIOS sold around €120 (mostly out of stock in 8/2007; used items at eBay ~ €20-35). It already boots coreboot. Latest legacy BIOS is from May 2006 v.1013. Socket 939 Athlons do not have Pacifica Virtualization.

The ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe, an "nforce 4 sli" board probably shares the same PCB design with more solder pads populated (please confirm), and is also out of stock mostly.

The ASUS A8NE-FM/S has initial support in the form of a patch.

Hot plugging a BIOS chip was successfully done (pull out chip with glued-on handle while running Linux), so you don't necessarily need an external EPROM programmer, just a spare working 49LF004 chip. 8 MBit SST 49LF080A was also successfully flashed and booted with legacy BIOS (two images concatenated). The PLCC32 BIOS chip is of type SST 49LF004B of which you need a spare programmed piece. You might reflash an empty or used one plugged into your A8N.

Enable Serial Console for debugging. It will come up at 115200,8n1 option SERIAL_CONSOLE The revisions 3000 and up work, but don't expect anything to see on the POST card. The serial Terminal will show whether LB manages with your RAM.

run targets/buildtarget then run make in the A8N-E directory. you get a 512KB image. abuild may come up with a 508KB image, which is not working.

in bash you may type svn co svn://coreboot.org/buildrom then type "make menuconfig" but the A8NE is not supported there yet.

Known issues

• this tutorial is not as complete as the one for Gigabyte M57-SLI, so please look there for info on building the image.

• Currently PS/2 keyboards do not work, but USB keyboards do.
• Single DIMM support only : the blue DIMM_B1 socket should be populated only.
• The MAC address is stored in flash for almost all CK804/MCP55 boards. All of these boards flashed with LB probably have the same MAC address. See src/southbridge/nvidia/ck804/romstrap.inc and src/southbridge/nvidia/mcp55/romstrap.inc for details. On some of these boards, the MAC address is stored in a separate EEPROM, but you can't count on that.

TODO

If you can help out with this, please join the mailing list and let us know!

This work is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or any later version. This work is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.