[coreboot] ASRock E350M1: Boot delay with debug enabled, system RAM reported incorrectly in Linux

[Marshall Buschman]

On 6/19/2011 1:38 AM, Scott Duplichan wrote:
> Marshall Buschman wrote:
>
> ]Hello:
> ]
> ]With Scott's work on PCIe support for the E350M1, the NIC and USB3 are
> ]now working -- Thanks Scott!
>
> Thanks for testing it on both the boards. Good to hear it works.
>
> ]The remaining problems that I know of are:
> ]
> ]1) Enabling coreboot serial debugging slows system boot dramatically: 5min+
> ]Someone mentioned in IRC that this is because we are attempting to write
> ]to the serial device before it is ready, which causes some kind of
> ]timeout/backoff/retry sequence. How can I help with this?
>
> That is weird. The log file you sent is 38819 bytes. I would expect the
> boot time penalty to be not much more than the I/O time of 38819 bytes /
> (11520 bytes/second) = 3.37 seconds. I did a test with loglevel 8. It logged
> 45745 bytes and the boot time from cold reset to DOS prompt was 5.56
> seconds. When I watch the serial output, it spews text nearly continuously.
> There is no hardware or software handshaking for the writes, so nothing
> should slow it down.
There's something strange afoot -- It's not that it outputs slowly, it's 
that you get literally no serial output or boot activity of any kind for 
potentially several minutes (Peter Stuge observed ~5min, I observed 
times closer to 20min).
>
>
> ]2) System RAM is reported incorrectly. In linux, "free -m" reports 480mb
> ]of total RAM -- the full total is 4gb.
>
> I see, I had tested only a small memory configuration so far. It looks
> like any size greater than 4GB will fail. Try the attached patch.
>
> Thanks,
> Scott
>
I will test this now and report back.

Thanks!
-Marshall Buschman