Coreboot and SeaBIOS

[mickchip]

I've installed your driver Mevi on win8 and have had no problems yet,
have rebooted a couple of times since installing and still OK.
Can this driver do scaling?

[Mevi]

This is my first ever driver and made from Inaxeon's instructions, so I can't claim any credit for anything beyond uploading it for all to download. With a good starting point, I can investigate how to downscale from a higher res. I've seen drivers that claim to do it - Yushatak's driver is one (doesn't work on the Joggler).

Mick, is your W8 running off USB or PATA? Mine is running off USB and thinks it's a Windows To Go judging by the occasional pop up warning not to disconnect the USB HDD, although I didn't set it up that way. The page file works off the same USB HDD with no changes to the disk.sys driver needed.

I've tried another fix-all 3rd party audio driver for the Sigmatel/IDT chipset (MichaelMorley.com). It gets rid of the digital chirps coming out of the speakers, but the primary sound says it's the optical digital port. No sound on speakers or headphones. Hmmmm. I'll see if he's contactable.

[Mevi]

Here's the info in the EMGD driver documentation which relates to stolen system memory.

[inaxeon]

Here's the info in the EMGD driver documentation which relates to stolen system memory.

gms-emgd.jpg

Man, what the heck is Intel on about. GMA500 only has 3 options for stolen memory size: 1MB, 4MB and 8MB. I picked 4 because 8 is complete overkill for an 800x480 FB. Guess that's going to have to go on the reading pile.

[mickchip]

I had a go with some existing drivers off the net and this is what I got, no 800x480

[Mevi]

I had the same luck with ones I downloaded before I made this one. I'm drawing a blank looking for scaling options in the driver config or in the included documentation. Googling hasn't got me any further, but I'm still looking.

[Mevi]

I've messaged a guy called Micheal Marley, who is a Sigmatel/IDT guru:

Hi Michael,

I'm visiting from another forum dedicated to modding the O2 Joggler/Openpeak Openframe. This is a 7" touchscreen appliance based on the Intel US15W Poulsbo 1.3Ghz Atom chipset and has Sigmatel audio. jogglerwiki.com

One of our members has replaced the 32bit EFI with Coreboot/SeaBIOS. This means that we are now able to natively boot Windows XP, 7 & 8 and are busily gathering up hardware drivers. The one thing that has always been a stumbling block is the Audio.

HDAUDIO\FUNC_01&VEN_8384&DEV_7632&SUBSYS_00000100&REV_1001

With XP, using a patched INI file we could either get the headphone socket working with the built in speaker emitting faint digital fizz OR both the headphone socket and speakers working SIMULTANEOUSLY. Very strange. With more recent operating systems now available, this is probably something we can live with.

With Windows 7 & 8 and Microsoft's driver, we get no audio on the headphone socket and that faint digital fizz on the speakers.

Using your driver, the fizz has disappeared and the driver seems to respond to the headphones being plugged in, but no sound on either.

Personally, I think the sound chip is being used in a way that is dissimilar to how it is used in laptops & PCs. I wondered if we are able to pick your brains as to how we can patch your driver/edit the registry or whatever else we can do to get the sound working.

many thanks,

Mevi

[inaxeon]

I just downloaded the EMGD. Looks pretty straight forward, certainly has a lot less pointy bits than the IEGD.

I've just uploaded another build called 'coreboot_emgd.rom' to the usual location. It's got the EMGD companion VBIOS in it. I doubt that it'll make a lick of difference - Intel generally say that the Embedded Windows drivers and VBIOS don't interact, unlike the GMA driver and GMA VBIOS which do.

[Mevi]

Thanks Inaxeon. I flashed with coreboot_emgd.rom. It might just be me, but the W8 GUI seems a lot more fluid. Switching between desktop and metro is quicker than it was earlier today. Aside from flashing the rom, I've done nothing else. Display properties show 64MB system memory. It still bluescreens 'page fault in nonpaged area'. Looking at the minidump, they are all kernel errors:

Code: Select all

082612-33477-01.dmp	26/08/2012 00:36:09	PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA	0x00000050	0xfffffff4	0x00000000	0x8110cdd8	0x00000000	ntoskrnl.exe	ntoskrnl.exe+f7cb0	NT Kernel & System	Microsoft® Windows® Operating System	Microsoft Corporation	6.1.7601.17835 (win7sp1_gdr.120503-2030)	32-bit	ntoskrnl.exe+f7cb0	ntoskrnl.exe+3a585	ntoskrnl.exe+16e654	ntoskrnl.exe+fbdd8		C:\Windows\Minidump\082612-33477-01.dmp	2	15	9200	142,112	

At idle, with nothing but the task manager running, it's using around 450MB memory in use. I'll rebuild using Mick's method and see if that cures it - From his screenshots I can see he's using the pre-release preview, whereas I'm using the RTM.

[Mevi]

Started again clean & using the EMGD video BIOS:

Yep, using the MS driver the total memory usage is around 280-290MB. Rebooted a few times to be sure. Desktop/metro switching scrolling is smooth.

After installing the EMGD the memory usage immediately jumps up to 430-450MB. Rebooted once OK, but next reboots resulted in the familiar bluescreen. Lots of HDD thrashing.

I wish Openpeak gave the Joggler more RAM. It's interesting to see the Atom processor's Ghz speed up and slow down in realtime.

[inaxeon]

It still bluescreens 'page fault in nonpaged area'. Looking at the minidump, they are all kernel errors

I've seen the IEGD do that on Win 7. Don't think it's anything new. Good if there's a mechanism to reliably reproduce it, that'll make it easier to fix.

In terms of memory usage, I recall seeing a tickbox in the EMGD CED "Disable hardware acceleration for WPF". Try ticking that. It's obviously decided to do a whole bunch more stuff since the driver was loaded. I think having WPF hardware acceleration means you'll now have the whole DirectX woodwork loaded and in memory.

DirectX support for any graphics cores from Imagination Technologies (which the GMA500 is) is typically poor, so I'd drop that feature regardless.

BTW: There is no "MS driver" before loading the EMGD, that's the VGA BIOS doing the work there, which is still the EMGD.

[hawsey]

The windows 8 install part is actually quite easy. The first part to get your head around is that Inaxeon's BIOS replaces your EFI, meaning that you'd need to commit to saying goodbye to the factory OS and any of the other OS that have been made to run on the Joggler. It needn't be permanent, however as you can reflash back to the original EFI later on if you are sure to make a backup.

Read the 'wiki' about un-bricking your Joggler, which details how to backup and write to the joggler's EFI chip using the factory OS and SSH. If you feel confident after that, see if Inaxeon is happy to share the coreboot.rom file outside the small test group.

Cheers Mevi , I think I could probably just about manage it but am down to one joggler at the mo so will keep on reading any flavour osx would be nice to see , but lovin W8 progress very impressive work guys .

[inaxeon]

If you feel confident after that, see if Inaxeon is happy to share the coreboot.rom file outside the small test group.

I'm happy to publicly share that now, given that the self programming feature seems to be working OK. I release the ROMS to here:

http://xpander.mattmillman.com/data/files/coreboot.rom

The only properly working OS is DOS. Hopefully we can drag in some other developers one day, because I'm a little hard pressed for time right now.

[danfoshizzle]

Wow, lots of stuff going on, Yeah the joggler's powervr is poorly supported, found that out a long time ago, also maybe a lighter build of windows 8 would do the trick, I know from the xp days how heavy a full on os can be, I have a light version sitting here, will give it a try tonight folks and if its any any good heres a link if you would like to try it: http://pirateproxy.net/torrent/7521267/ ... ult_by_nil , I will also ask my mate about making a custom joggler win 8, with it being tuned to the joggler.

[Mevi]

Hawsey, when this project is ready for primetime, I don't think you'll want to go back to the EFI unless you miss the factory OS. It's been great to contribute to the forum again.

I unticked the hardware acceleration and made a new driver installer. The memory usage was no less than with acceleration. Lots of disk thrashing. Still had the bluescreens when shutting down too. Uninstalled EMGD and back to the VGA, memory use down to mid-200s again.

[pete]

You guys are great!

[inaxeon]

Page 109 of the EMGD manual is pretty interesting. What do those registry entries say right now? If the EMGD is pinching another 64MB of RAM from somewhere, that is going to cause some page faults alright.

I certainly haven't put anything in the e820 map to whack off another chunk of RAM from the 4MB I've already allocated.

[Mevi]

How can I help with this? Will those entries be in the Windows registry?

[inaxeon]

Never mind. Just realised that only applied to Windows 7 Compact.

I'd love to know where all this memory is going. Is something you guys can investigate? Hint: Task manager may not be very helpful if they're all Kernel buffers.

On a side note, that main thing that's blocking us from using the GMA driver is that Embedded VBIOSes don't provide it with any timing, backlight or LVDS parameters, it needs these because it's not customisable like the IEGD/EMGD. I'm wondering if Intel may have made the relatively trivial effort of implementing this in the EMGD VBIOS

Translation: Try the GMA driver when running the EMGD VBIOS edition, there's a small chance it may work.

[mickchip]

OSX leopard, I think it is just the video on the joggler stopping me getting it working.
I did an install of Leopard 10.5.7 on my Q1 Ultra on to a stick and removed it before it rebooted,
put stick in joggler and booted. At the time I had my keyboard and qsb speakers plugged in,
after a few minutes of the apple logo with spinning dots I got the welcome music through my speakers
but no video so can't get any further yet. Will keep trying.