LC2430 - laptop candidate for LinuxBIOS (Intel 845G)?

Bari Ari bari at onelabs.com
Wed Jan 14 23:10:01 CET 2004


Peter Lister wrote:

> Yes, but presumably a supplier who might handle a reasonable number of
> units is likelier to get a hearing from the upstream vendor than the
> average end user, especially if there is no intervening retail vendor
> who understands nothing but M$.
> 
> Just out of interest, my laptop is a Clevo SiS unbranded, no Windows
> job. Winmodem doesn't work, as one might expect, and the sound card
> needs Linux ACPI support turned on, but other than that it's fine.
> 
> Oh, and the VGA text mode is badly aligned when the framebuffer is
> working. But that's liveable with. Nothing else wrong, though.
> 
> lspci attached. What are the chances??

The SiS 650 chipset was never supported by LinuxBIOS. SiS also dropped 
interest in LinuxBIOS last year.

A laptop that uses any of the currently supported chipsets or any 
chipsets by Intel or AMD won't be a problem (since they openly post docs 
for their chipsets) to support under LinuxBIOS except for the issues 
with the keyboard scan micros that are also used for power management, 
battery charging, BIOS Flashing etc. Laptops typically use I/O on these 
micros to control writes to the flash. You may need to know the "magic 
code" or at least the register locations in the micro to turn on BIOS 
Flash write enables.

We did some work before on creating open firmware for these devices.

Some examples of cpu based super i/o's:

http://www.renesas.com/eng/products/mpumcu/16bit/h8s/2100/index.html

Some descriptions of the closed source firmware and how they use these 
micros:

http://www.insydesw.com/solutions/pc/keyboard.htm

http://www.phoenix.com/en/products/phoenix+cme+firstbios/system+firmware/technologies/phoenix+multikey.htm

-Bari





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