Hi & 440lx chipset

Paul Millar paulm at astro.gla.ac.uk
Fri Feb 11 12:08:01 CET 2005


On Friday 11 February 2005 16:33, Richard Smith wrote:
> I just look on developer.intel.com and fouind the 440LX datasheet. 
> At my (really) quick glance it looks very similar to the BX.  You
> might just get lucky and have it come up and work.

Fingers crossed!

> What's the FSB speed of that board?  Can it do 100Mhz or only 66?

I while back I searched for BIOS upgrades for Janus' MSI 6117 
motherboard.  I found out that it was already at the most recent 
version, but I also found a set of the manuals.  I've dug them out 
and placed them, temporarily, at [1]

[1] - http://www.astro.gla.ac.uk/users/paulm/Janus/

It looks like the motherboard supports only "officially" the 66MHz 
FSB.

The installation manual (6117-2.pdf) mentions support for 68MHz and 
75MHz, but these are "reserved functions", whatever that means ;^)

> Ok I would suggest that you start with a copy of the bitworks
> board. (mainboard/bitworks/ims)  change the superIO and rework the
> ROM size to match your board and work from there.

OK, I'll give that a bash.

BTW, I've now acquired a genuine 440BX machine that I can play with 
without worrying about destroying it.  I'm currently installing 
Debian on it and bringing it up to speed.  Once that's done, I'll try 
flashing a LinuxBIOS and see how it goes.

Some questions, probably FAQ-like (sorry).  I currently have the 
existing BIOS booting GRUB off the MBR (on both machines)

  1a.  LinuxBIOS can be flashed with one of several different targets, 
right?

  1b. Do I want to use FILO as the target inside the LinuxBIOS?

  2.  I can't use FILO to simply chain-boot grub because either grub 
does BIOS calls that LinuxBIOS doesn't support, grub expects to be in 
real-mode, or some other problem.  Is that right?

  3.  Does FILO support loading some configuration information off the 
disk, like grub does?

  4. Does FILO follow symbolic links (on an ext2 filesystem) OK?  My 
(rough) plan is to have a sym-link off the root directory pointing to 
the current kernel image.


A random extra bit of info, I just found this page:
  http://www.openbios.org/development/devbios.html

I haven't tried it yet, but if it works, it would make flashing new 
images a lot easier.  A link from your web-page might be a good idea.


> > Does [winbond 977TF rev 0] sound promising?
>
> Yes.  Theres a few number missing but thats probally a w83977tf.
> Theres a w83977ef in the tree.  I'm sure the differences between
> the tf and ef are really minor.  But check your number and google
> for the datasheet on the part.

The summary table from [2] shows the two with only superficial 
differences:
> W83977TF  W83877TF plus KBC, GP I-O, Wake-Up 
> W83977EF  W83877TF plus KBC, GP I-O, Wake-Up, Power Fail Resume 

... although the Power Fail Resume function sounds like the what-to 
do-if-the-power-fails option in the AMI BIOS.  On Janus, this 
currently doesn't work.  It would be handy if it, but hey ho.

[2] - http://www.datasheetarchive.com/datasheet/pdf/5256.html


> Let me send you my config file.  I't probally won't compile against
> the stock V1 tree since I think I've added several config options
> for my own use but those should be pretty easy to fix.

Ta, 

Paul.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://www.coreboot.org/pipermail/coreboot/attachments/20050211/45b4b5e4/attachment.sig>


More information about the coreboot mailing list