[coreboot] ASUS SP98-N BIOS

[Andreas Rudin]

Hello.

We have 600 PCs with ASUS SP98-N mainboards (supersocket7, 2 sdram
slots, usb, vga, sound and lan onboard) here with us, which we want
to get running as clients on LTSP (www.ltsp.org) - systems, we provide
for social and educational projects in different African countries.
To use these mainboards with LTSP it would be a great advantage to be
able to boot from the onboard LAN.

This mainboard has a SIS 5598 chip and an onboard Intel 82558 LAN-Chip.

Although you find in the manual of the mainboard in
section 4.4.1 "Details of Bios Features Setup", in the boot sequence
the options:

LAN,A,C and LAN,C,A

I tried all the available BIOS-versions provided by ASUS, and none of
them have this option.

On coreboot.org neither this mainboard nor the SIS 5598 is mentioned.

Is there anyone, who already has some experience with this mainboard or
chipset?
If not, I'm now searching for someone, who could help me to understand
the ASUS Bios in order to be able to eventually change the settings.

The third way would be to integrate the boot image for the Intel 82558
chip, which can be found on etherboot.org to the mainbaord bios.
We already have tried this, but there is the problem, that there is not
enough empty space for it in the existing bios.
This means we have to throw unneeded components out to make place for
the etherboot rom.
But here again I need help, because we don't understand, where the
different parts of the bios are located inside the binary code of the bios.

So any further ideas and help are really appriciated very much :-)

Thanks

Andreas

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