[coreboot] searching volunteer to install coreboot on asus m4a78 pro

Jelle de Jong jelledejong at powercraft.nl
Sat Feb 12 13:26:19 CET 2011


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On 12-02-11 08:03, xdrudis wrote:
> My setup  is similar to yours, I bought it trying to get easy coreboot
> support (easy, not immediate, and also some features), I've spent
> some 6 months trying to "install coreboot" and it still does not
> boot. But I'm not experienced in low level programming and I don't
> have that much spare time to experiment. So don't count on me 
> as a volunteer. It's also not something I'd like to do on ssh.
> You have to do a lot of trying and exchange one chip for another,
> and it's already slighty tiresome if you're there physically, let alone
> having to wait for someone on IRC... There's also some risk of breaking something
> that I wouldn't like to take.

This ain’t good news :( Will a bounty of 100 Euro help to get the
coreboot working with the needed features on this motherboard in less
then 3 months?

> Does your board have a serial port (RS232)?
> The photos look a lot like my board. Mine has one but I don't see it in yours

Yes, there is a COM1 header for the serial port.

> Try to see the marking on the EPROM chip.

(see attachment) (imagebin was down)
Winbond 25X80AVA17
0903

> My board still doesn't boot though. It currently gets to 
> ram stage and hangs while enabling pci devices. It's similar
> to a problem I found in romstage and I worked around it with 
> a patch that wasn't probably the right approach (it wasn't commited).
> This time I'll have to see what's causing it (likely that I have
> an RX781, not an RS780, it's more or less the same without 
> graphics, but I may have to tweak something somehow). 

>> * ECC Memory support
> Not sure this works

Does somebody know if ECC DDR2 and DDR3 works with coreboot? It's
essential for my systems to countermeasure bitflips issues.

>> I got two M4A78 PRO motherboards that I would like to give new life by
>> getting coreboot on them.
> New life ? They are not so old as to have died yet...
> There're similar boards already that might work:
> src/mainboard/asus/m4a785-m
> src/mainboard/asus/m4a78-em 

The M4A78 PRO are not being soled any-more, I switched to expensive
server motherboards from intel and supermicro to have serial console
redirection. I use alix motherboards for all network appliances (I will
add coreboot to the alix systems soon)

For my customer-grade server motherboards I'm now using:
Gigabyte GA-890GPA-UD3H [1]
Asus M4A89GTD PRO [2]
[1] http://www.asus.com/product.aspx?P_ID=Gdf0vtpVf72LTYgs
[2] http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=3516#sp

If it is better to donate one of these motherboards to an coreboot
developer please tell me where to send one and what would be a
reasonable ETA (in months) for a working coreboot system?

Thanks in advance,

With kind regards,

Jelle de Jong
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