Questions on BX Chipset

[Richard Smith]

Meinrad Sauter wrote:

I'm just now reading the original post.... Missed it earlier.

> - Soft Power-Off: I used the APM-BIOS in my Original Setup for this. I 
> understand that LinuxBIOS doesn't implement such BIOS functions. I also found 
> a kernel patch that implements this feature for SIS-Chipsets. Is there a 
> possibility to get that thin running on a BX board?

ADLO might help you here but I don't remember if it supports APM or not. 
  I'm also not sure if the Bochs bios code is still going to be  present 
in ram after you boot linux.

> - HD-Spindown: Same as above, simply doesnt work with my current LinuxBIOS 
> setup

I though hdparm could do this.

> - VGA: The Multitainer has an onboard MPACT2 Graphics adapter. It would be 
> nice to have, but not really required. From the docs, I think I could make it 
> work using ADLO or with the builtin VGA support. What do you think?

See my other post.

> - Wake on RTC: Not even the original BIOS supported this. Anyway I don't think 
> its a hardware limitation. Do you think it is possible to implement this for 
> LinuxBIOS?

There is an internal RTC in the 440bx which supports an alarm function 
via irq8.  These pins are also muxed with some GPIO.  So it's not a 
limit of the 440bx but it might be a limit of your motherboard depending 
on what they did with those pins. If they are using that pin as a GPI 
then I don't think you can enable the internal IRQ8.  Or if they have an 
external IRQ8 you will have problems as well.  Unless of course its an 
external RTC.  But I don't know why you would do that when an internal 
one exists already.

Either way there isn't any software support for it in Linuxbios.  Doing 
a suspend requires lots of register saving and then restoring in the 
right order.  I'm not even sure if all the documentation on what 
registers to set/read is available via the Intel's site docs.  Some 
reverse engineering with a 440bx based laptop system might have to occur.

-- 
Richard A. Smith
rsmith at bitworks.com