LinuxBios in epia m-10000 (freebios2)

[Dave Ashley]

>is the M-10000 different in some way important from the standard EPIA-M?

My take is the 10000 is different only in that it has a bigger heat sink
that covers the southbridge chip, and there is a cpu fan, and it runs at
1 ghz. Otherwise it is identical. My lspci -n matched exactly.

Regarding epia-m, I'm not sure if the changes I posted were incorporated
into the freebios tree. These consisted of
1) VGA working fully at least for going into linux/XFree86
2) Fixed vga bug where it would get in an endless loop and not exit in the
init (actually came up with a workaround).
3) Improved the reboot procedure so it does a pci reset to reset the pci bus.
This is for a clean soft reset.

Other people don't seem to experience the epia-m problems we have. We are
using them without any cooling fans, just the 600 mhz version. With the
stock bios some percentage of boards are really touchy as regards overheating.
They can be running fine, then you power it off and power it on again, and
it will just sit there beeping forever. If I blow a fan on the motherboard
that fixes it.

I also don't understand the interest in the epia (Not M). We tried these first
and found them unsatisfactory because the composite/svideo output had awful
color banding. VIA upscaled us to the epia-m.

Our current epia-m status: as far as I know everything is working
100% except the serial port is 1/2 the baud rate it should be (57600 max
instead of 115200). We even have a watchdog timer that reboots the epia-m
in case of lockup. Oh, and we don't have the auto SPD ddr configuration.
We're running the original freebios, not freebios2.

A lot of people seem to have epia-m spd configuration on their roadmap but
no one has jumped into it. I recently tried building freebios2 now that
the linuxbios cvs server appears working again. My system was redhat 7.1
and so wouldn't build. I've upgraded to slackware 9.1 now and am ready to
try again.

What I'm hoping to find is that the SPD configuration is similiar/identical
across the 2 VIA chipsets. Also that there is little difference between
SDRAM + DDR configuration. So that hopefully just changing a few constants
will get SPD auto configuration working for the epia-m...I got as far as
being able to read out the SPD contents on the epia-m (freebios) but didn't
take it any further.

It sounds like freebios2 is what everyone wants to work on and freebios is
going to get left behind, so I'd better go along...

-Dave