[coreboot] Asus M2V-MX problems
Rudolf Marek
r.marek at assembler.cz
Tue Jan 31 22:36:54 CET 2012
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
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