[coreboot] m57sli VGA failure

[Ronald Hoogenboom]

Hi,

I've got the mobo in a state where it finishes the coreboot, elfboot
fetches the linux kernel from SPI flash and I can see the 'earlyprintk'
messages generated by that kernel on the serial port. The VGA console is
not working, though.

My VGA is a nvidia 8600GT (10de/0402).

Looking at the messages related to the VGA initialization, I notice the
following:

-- During coreboot 'Initializing devices', the following is printed:

rom address for PCI: 07:00.0 = f7000000
Incorrect Expansion ROM Header Signature ffff

-- The VGA card is on PCI bus 07 according to coreboot, but on bus 02
according to 'lspci' when booted with proprietary bios.

-- Several memory ranges are different.

lspci: Memory at fa000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16M]
coreb: [0x00f6000000 - 0x00f6ffffff] size 0x01000000 gran 0x18 mem

lspci: Memory at e0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M]
coreb: [0x00f4000000 - 0x00f5ffffff] size 0x02000000 gran 0x19 mem64

lspci: Memory at f8000000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=32M]
coreb: [0x00f4000000 - 0x00f5ffffff] size 0x02000000 gran 0x19 mem64

lspci: I/O ports at 9000 [size=128]
coreb: [0x0000001000 - 0x000000107f] size 0x00000080 gran 0x07 io

lspci: [virtual] Expansion ROM at fb000000 [disabled] [size=128K]
coreb: [0x00f7000000 - 0x00f701ffff] size 0x00020000 gran 0x11 romem

** This last one is where the signature is wrong

When the kernel switches from the 'earlyprintk' console to the normal
console, it sometimes hangs just before and sometimes right after. It
reports using a 'dummy colour VGA console' then (probably because there
isn't a real one...).

Is the PCI bus number difference an issue here? I think it just means
that the K8 HT Host bridge is initialized differently... Shouldn't be a
problem(?).
The expansion ROM signature ffff seems to me that the reported memory
range is NOT where the ROM actually is. How can that be gotten wrong?
PCI should be Plug and Play, not? Is the expansion ROM actually used for
VGA console?

Please help. I think other users would be interested to see this setup
work. Nice addition to the m57sli tutorial.

Ronald.