[LinuxBIOS] Support for IEI Nova4899R [1]

Luis Correia lfcorreia at lfcorreia.dyndns.org
Sat Nov 4 21:37:41 CET 2006


Hi,

i'm currently trying to build a linuxbios ROM for this
embedded board and there are some questions that need
some answers.

This board uses the following components:

Geode GX1 300Mhz
Geode cs5530
SuperIO Winbond w83977f
sensor chip Winbond w83782
3 * realtek rtl8100 ethernet chips
1 ICP HA6629, presumably an hw watchdog and digital io chip
ac97 sound chip AD1881
a PCI slot

as for the connection, it also provides:
two serial ports
one irda pin header
the vga output
one floppy
one paralell port
one standard IDE
one laptop style 44 pin IDE
onboard compactflash socket
one socket for DoM module


The reason behind the need for linuxbios is that the original
bios does not have any good method for IRQ sharing, and it simply
freezes when eth0 is up and some device on the PCI bus is also up.

Which means that the IRQ sharing is not happening at all...
(unless i'm talking rubbish...)

I have managed to build a rom for it, using the eaglelion as a base
setup, but modifying the superio chip and the PCI device assignments.

And for my surprise, it worked right from the start with some minor
tweaking to the FILO 0.5 commandline parameters.

Since i didn't load any VGA bios i'm stuck with serial console only.

---

now for my questions:

a) can the VGA rom be loaded as some sort of payload, and thus be
automatically added during the build process, or the described
procedure here http://www.linuxbios.org/VGA_support is still
the best way ?

b) is there any way to tell where the IRQ pins for each PCI device
are connected to the IRQ router chip?

c) i built an irq_tables.c using getpir, but it didn't actually
helped much, as now i've got fewer devices working compared with
the original bios :) (which i'm not that surprised at all)
is getpir still the best method of detecting the original configuration?

d) any other input you might give for help is welcome


p.s. i apologise in advance for any blunt mistakes or typo's i may have
wrote, as English is not my native language, i'm Portuguese btw. ;)

Luis Correia





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