[coreboot] Issues with Geos mainboard

[Kevin O'Connor]

On Fri, May 21, 2010 at 06:26:04PM +1000, Nathan Williams wrote:
> On 20/05/2010 10:56 PM, Kevin O'Connor wrote:
> > On Thu, May 20, 2010 at 03:04:01PM +1000, Nathan Williams wrote:
> >> Currently I'm having 4 issues with coreboot-v4 on this board:
> >>
> >> 1.  On initial power-on, SeaBIOS doesn't get past "Press F12 for boot menu."
> > Can you post the full log?  An error in "Press F12" is likely a
> > problem with the RTC.
> 
> Ah.. It works if I have the CMOS battery in.

That's odd.  I don't know why a reboot would fix the RTC if it didn't
work the first boot.  Interestingly, some time back Stefan reported a
board which could only get past "Press F12" on the first boot.

I put together a patch to remove the dependency on the RTC periodic
irq for the boot menu.  (See:
http://www.seabios.org/pipermail/seabios/2010-May/000541.html ).  I
hope to check this into the SeaBIOS git repo in the next few days.

This should make SeaBIOS more robust even with these hardware errors.
(The bootloader/OS may still fail, but it should get past the SeaBIOS
init.)

-Kevin