ASUS A8N5X

ASUS A8N-E, rev. 2.00 (no picture for A8N5X available, but it is almost identical)

This HOWTO explains how to use coreboot on the ASUS A8N5X board.

As of 2008-11-20, a small patch is needed for RAM access to work properly.

Status

Device/functionality	Status	Comments
CPU
CPU works	OK	Tested: AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3500+.
L1 cache enabled	OK	CPU: L1 Cache: 128K
L2 cache enabled	OK	CPU: L2 Cache: 512K
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), and with two DIMMs in slots DIMM_B1 and DIMM_B2.
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).
On-board IDE 2.5"	N/A
On-board SATA	Untested
On-board SCSI	Unknown
On-board USB	OK	Tested: USB keyboard
On-board VGA	N/A
On-board ethernet	OK
On-board audio	No	It didn't work with proprietary BIOS either (using Linux/ALSA)
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	No	Plugging any PCI card almost always result in crash when something attempts to access the PCI bus (although, specific cards were found not to produce this error, YMMV)
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	No	Doesn't seem to be detected
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	OK
PS/2 mouse	Untested
Game port	Untested
Infrared	Untested
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	Untested
Other powersaving features	N/A
ACPI	Untested
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)	OK
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.

Building coreboot

Note: you can use the same target as for the ASUS A8N-E board. At the time of writing there's no specific target for the ASUS A8N5X.

$ svn co svn://coreboot.org/repos/trunk/coreboot-v2
$ cd coreboot-v2/targets
$ ./buildtarget asus/a8n_e
$ cd asus/a8n_e/asus_a8n_e

Now place your payload in this directory and name it payload.elf. Complete the build with:

$ make

The resulting coreboot.rom file (512 KB) can now be flashed using e.g. flashrom.

Known issues

• The MAC address is stored in flash. All A8N5X boards flashed with coreboot probably have the same MAC address. See src/southbridge/nvidia/ck804/romstrap.inc for details.

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.