Is 440BX ported to Linuxbios v2?

[Peter Stuge]

On Thu, Jan 13, 2005 at 10:54:59PM +0100, Svante Signell wrote:
> I found the BIOS chip brand and version: Its a Winbond W290C020-90
> (84400M282325601VA). Any suppliers available somehere?

Farnell has an equivalent part in stock at the very fair price of
46,43 SEK (USD 7) for single quantities.

I can't seem to reproduce a working direct link, but go to
http://se.farnell.com/ and search for 4376146, it should come up with
the AT29C020-90PI from Atmel. It has some extra bells and whistles
compared to the Winbond, but it will do the job just fine.


If for some reason that doesn't work out, you could contact Memec in
Stockholm and ask for the SST39SF020A-70-4C-PH or anything else they
suggest/stock with similar parameters.

If you don't represent a company they may not want to do business
with you directly but in that case I have good connections with them
and would be happy to help you get some flash parts. They usually
have a minimum order value of 1000 SEK, but they might have good
programmer products for sale as well.

I checked ELFA and Bejoken too; ELFA has no suitable part, Bejoken
has one which would work although it's not a perfect match. It's a
Macronix 512kb part (4Mbit) - but their web order is down right now
so I can't find the pricing.

http://www.bejoken.se/bejokenweb/item/iteminfo.asp?ItemId=252521

(ELFA and Bejoken both retail electronic components here in Sweden.)


> Is it large enough to host LinuxBIOS?
> 
> My dual-CPU MSI-6120 MOBO

You could check if pin 1 (adress line 18) is connected anywhere, in
that case you could plug a 4Mbit part into the socket instead of the
2Mbit originally there, improving the odds of fitting LinuxBIOS and
the kernel into the flash quite a bit. But even with 512kb the kernel
still requires an effort to get the size down.


> has on-board dual channel Adaptec 7895 SCSI
> support. Does V1 support this?

No, but Ollie Lho's recent success with x86emu running VGA BIOSes
means it's certainly within reach for V2. I'm not sure if it will
have the same high priority once VGA support is worker, however.


//Peter