[coreboot] Asus M2V-MX problems

[Rudolf Marek]

Hi,

> I was hoping to use the board above to experiment with Coreboot.  The board has
> the same northbridge as the Asus M2V-MX SE (VIA K8M890) and the same southbridge
> as the Asus M2V (VIA 8237A).  Both of those chipsets are fully supported.
> Thinking that maybe I can at least get the board to boot ASAP, I built Coreboot
> for the Asus M2V board to get the southbridge functionality.  I also didn't use
> the M2V-MX SE profile because it has the SPI chip, while the M2V-MX board has a
> PLCC-32 chip.

OK


> The board booted fine, except I have no video, serial port or ability to write
> to the BIOS chip.

No video -> you need to include the extracted VGA bios from original BIOS. No 
serial port looks like wrong superio setup. No ability to write to the chip 
sounds interesting ? What do you mean by that. Flashrom cannot no-long overwrite 
the chip content? Maybe just some GPIO needs to be raised. Do you have more PLCC 
chips or other boards so you can hotswap them?

> I know the board booted fine because I was able to SSH into
> the box using a PCI network card.  Considering that both the M2V and M2V-MX have
> the same southbridge chip, I don't understand why there was not serial port or
> write access to the BIOS chip.  Can someone shed some light on that for me, please.

Yep see above. I would suggest to run the superiotool (see utils dir) and check 
what kind of superio is really there. Or even better provide ./superiotool -d 
dump best with original bios running if possible.

Then you just need to change few lines and you should get serial back. I can 
even help with that but we need to know not only the chip there but also how the 
chip is configured.

For the VGA you need to use bios_extract and extract the VGA bios from orig bios 
image and tell coreboot via menu to include that (you need just pci ID lspci -n 
will tell)

> My other problem is I would like to create a build profile for the M2V-MX using
> the code from the M2V for the southbridge and the code from the M2V-MX SE for
> the northbridge.  Is that a good idea or would I have to do some other things?
> I learned C programming in 1993 and used it only until 1998; I am a little
> rusty.

Well C is simple you will got it back soon.

> My ability to make sense of low-level chipset stuff is also very
> narrow.

If you ask good questions you will get answers.

>  However, I am a fast learner and I am desperate to get something
> accomplished for a homebrew thin client project that I have spent way too much
> time working on.
>
> My goal is to extend the life of boards that people send in for recycling by
> turning them into more reliable diskless information terminals.

A nice coreboot use!

Thanks
Rudolf