[coreboot] SIS630ET coreboot challenge

[Keith Hui]

Hi all,

After hours spent yesterday, some Chipquik, one heatgun pass, and a
dead board scare later, I managed to solder a PLCC socket on my TUSI-M
board.

SIS630ET is still on my radar, but I'm going to need some help.

In the spirit of the "coreboot challenge" below, let me propose
another one: Port coreboot v4 to SIS630ET, then to Asus TUSI-M.
This is a challenge because most if not all of the SIS chipsets have
no public documentation, and so far from reversing my factory BIOS I
don't recognize any of the registers the TUSI-M factory BIOS programs,
after reading what's available from coreboot v1. To be legally safe, I
would like one person/team to reverse the factory BIOS of a number of
630ET boards, then produce a documentation. Then another person/team
(can be myself) do the port to that documentation.

And one interesting bit: I noticed a special check for "CentaurHauls"
CPUID in the factory BIOS, which also uses CAR.

Cheers
Keith

On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 10:17 AM, Joseph Smith <joe at settoplinux.org> wrote:
>
>
>
> On Tue, 27 Apr 2010 10:01:28 -0400, Keith Hui <buurin at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> Hello,
>>>> I want to propose a "coreboot challenge" to first port coreboot to the
>>>> i840 chpset, second port coreboot to support a very rare i840 dual cpu
>>>> board, third instead of RAMBUS (which i840 is designed for) this board
>>>> uses SDRAM. I think this would be a very interesting port for coreboot.
>>>>
>>>> The board is a AMI Megatrends MegaDual. The user manual can be found
>>>> here: http://www.ami.com/support/doc/MegaDual_mb_man.PDF
>>>>
>>>> I have four of these rare boards and am willing to donate three of them
>>>> (one person each, less shipping costs of course) to anyone who is
>>>> willing to take on this challenge. Let me know if your interested.
>>>>
>>
>> Sounds like some sort of reference board for workstations/servers.
>>
>> i840+SDRAM means this board has one or two MTHs. This is going to be
> epic.
>>
> Yes it should be interesting :-)
>
>> (No I won't be able to attempt it - I still have 440BX and SIS630ET in
>> my pipeline.)
>>
> That's OK Keith. I actually have allot of other i8xx boards that are a
> higher priority than this one. I knew I was not going to be able to get to
> it for a while that is why I am offering up my 3 spare boards for free so
> others could hack along if they want.
>
> I am actually suprised no one has jumped for the oppritunity to get a free
> motherboard.
>
> I do have a few SIS 630's kicking around so I will be looking forward to
> your work on that :-)
>
> --
> Thanks,
> Joseph Smith
> Set-Top-Linux
> www.settoplinux.org
>
>