[coreboot] 8 GB DIMMs on Nehalem (Arrandale)

[Stefan Tauner]

On Sun, 29 Jan 2017 07:15:18 +0100
Zoran Stojsavljevic <zoran.stojsavljevic at gmail.com> wrote:

> > The current raminit for Nehalem in coreboot is not able to train the two
> > 8 GB DIMMs I have tested so far. I have added a debug output to
> > choose_reg178 in the first loop before the margins are compared to
> > STANDARD_MIN_MARGIN that shows that all margins are 0.  
> 
> I would suggest to you to do the following: to return to the platform true
> BIOS, and to see if BIOS works with your Arrandale i5-520M (Thinkpad 410).
> Then you can try several different DIMM configurations, and see if BIOS
> supports up to maximum of 32GB (4 X 8GB DIMM).
> 
> Then, from these BIOS experiments, you can draw obvious conclusions in
> relations with Coreboot MRC algorithm. :-)

The T410s does have only two slots (NB: T410 is a completely different
model with a different casing). The 4-slot system is the W510 with the
clarkdale i7 CPU that does not have coreboot support at all.

In the T410s the vendor firmware and coreboot work fine with 2x 4GB
DIMMs but as soon as there is one 8GB DIMM even if it is the only stick
and no matter in which slot it is, things go crazy with the vendor
firmware and the raminit code of coreboot stops in the middle as
described earlier. So there is nothing obvious left to try regarding
DIMM combinations in the T410s.

-- 
Kind regards/Mit freundlichen Grüßen, Stefan Tauner