Board:asus/a8n e
Before you begin
The Asus A8N-E is an Athlon64 Socket 939 board (nforce 4 ultra) with socketed BIOS sold around €120 (mostly out of stock in 8/2007; used items at eBay ~ €20-35). It already boots LinuxBIOS. Latest legacy BIOS is from May 2006 v.1013. Socket 939 Athlons do not have Pacifica Virtualization.
The PLCC32 BIOS chip is of type SST 49LF004B of which you need a spare pre-programmed piece.
The ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe, an "nforce 4 sli" board probably shares the same PCB design with more solder pads populated (please confirm), and is also out of stock mostly.
The ASUS A8NE-FM/S has initial support in the form of a patch.
Hot plugging a BIOS chip was successfully done (pull out chip with glued-on handle while running Linux), so you don't necessarily need an external EPROM programmer, just a spare working 49LF004 chip. 8 MBit SST 49LF080A was also successfully flashed and booted with legacy BIOS (two images concatenated).
Known issues
- Currently PS/2 keyboards do not work, but USB keyboards do.
- Single DIMM support only.
- The MAC address is stored in flash for almost all CK804/MCP55 boards. All of these boards flashed with LB probably have the same MAC address. See src/southbridge/nvidia/ck804/romstrap.inc and src/southbridge/nvidia/mcp55/romstrap.inc for details. On some of these boards, the MAC address is stored in a separate EEPROM, but you can't count on that.
TODO
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