Coreboot and SeaBIOS

[pete]

inaxeon

is the openpeak_aptio_efi.rom the original O2 Joggler ROM or the Openpeak ROM?

[inaxeon]

First ever successful run of memtest86+ on a Joggler.



Unfortunately the latest crash I have starting Linux is a doosey.

mickchip: Have you ever seen this: When booting DSL on 0.2 or 0.3 I get a crazy screen corruption crash where I end up with vertical white and red stripes containing blinking ASCII smiley faces

?

I've got a rough idea what causes this but finding exact piece of code causing it is going to be difficult. Only one of my Jogglers does it too.

[inaxeon]

inaxeon

is the openpeak_aptio_efi.rom the original O2 Joggler ROM or the Openpeak ROM?

It's the O2 branded one. I should rename that...

[Mevi]

Inaxeon, I'll get a copy of the Openpeak EFI to you hopefully later tonight.

Pete, I had my Joggler disassembled for maybe 10 minutes while powered up as i took my time downloading the rom, formatted a flash drive, flashed chips a few time, etc. and the joggler didn't get hot. It's about as close to what we'd describe as a summer here in the UK - mid 20s degrees C.

My 'workbench' is my tiny desk in the bedroom. Full of junk so I use a tray on the bed when I'm Joggling.

[pete]

Thank you inaxeon.

I was paranoid about the heat. I put a small usb stick on the internal USB port with the two rom's and used one screw to hold it in place then removed the motherboard swapped chip wrote rom. Fast and easy. Used a piece of tape to remove and replace chip.

Booted into O2 ROM just fine after writing it. Then I wrote your newest version on same said rom to put back into test Joggler #1.

It really is much easier than doing the hot swap bios on a regular motherboard (from years ago that I did).

Apologies for making an issue out of this.

What do you suggest to test boot? DSL as before?

[Mevi]

I can relate to your EFI anxiety, pete. I remember feeling the same when I was swapping chips between Jogglers trying to identify what the NIC problem was (unsuccessfully). I only had 2 Jogglers then, so blowing one or both up was a bit of a nail-biting moment.

[pete]

Its an age I think today with me...been using them for this and that all over the house; yet I still had 3 off on the office bookshelf.

That and I am using the kichen table today instead of my desk....

That said the seabios that I have booting is labeled:

version ?-20120819_182405

Is that the most current one?

[inaxeon]

I was paranoid about the heat.

Don't worry about the heat. It's not an AMD Athlon from 10 years ago, and Intel chips from 10 years ago were indestructible by catastrophic thermal failure anyway, the situation is no different today. My development joggler is just a bare PCB. I've never had a heatsink anywhere near it. The Atom CPU has no chance of coming close to overheating and the US15W has ample built in mechanisms of preventing overheating - It'll just force a software crash which cools it down real fast.

[inaxeon]

Its an age I think today with me...been using them for this and that all over the house; yet I still had 3 off on the office bookshelf.

That and I am using the kichen table today instead of my desk....

That said the seabios that I have booting is labeled:

version ?-20120819_182405

Is that the most current one?

I'm using a mainline version of SeaBIOS at present so there is no version number (hence the '?'). Look at the screen which appears before that, that's the only version number I personally update.

It'll say something like

Code: Select all

coreboot for OpenFrame
by Matthew Millman <...@inaxeon.com>
ALPHA BUILD - UNRELIABILITY GUARANTEED
Version 0.3

It only shows for a second or so.

[pete]

Thank-you inaxeon. Done and ready to continue testing.

I have a workbench in the basement (cave?); but have never set it up. So its easy to work on the kitchen table these days.

As long as its stuff like this and not mechanical pieces of my cars ....(waf stuff)

[pete]

I plugged in a bootable SSD to external hub using DSL with a keyboard plugged in via a hub internally.

I initially saw:

"pc_keyb: controller jammed (0XFF)."

I hit control c and did get a prompt; but then I unplugged the Joggler as it happened very quickly.

Then I tried it again without the hub and the boot went to video hash after a bit.

[Mevi]

I'd love a basement. 3 floors at home but the kids rule here. Lunatics have taken over the asylum. ;P

Here's a link to the Openpeak EFI for Inaxeon to poke through: https://s3.amazonaws.com/mevi_joggler/openpeakefi.rom

I'm interested to know what the differences are.

[Mevi]

Inaxeon said that v0.2 & v0.3 won't boot DSL. Win98 DOS boots fine.

The 2nd USB DOS boot disk utilities (win98sec.exe) is the one that works: http://forums.mydigitallife.info/thread ... k-creators

[pete]

Yup saw that....and just kind of went past me...

Used Winimage to write a 98 floppy disk boot to a memory stick.

Worked. I am impressed. I am a a C prompt.

Thank you for the links Mevi; tried the posted link and it works just fine.

This is great!

[inaxeon]

I'd love a basement. 3 floors at home but the kids rule here. Lunatics have taken over the asylum. ;P

Here's a link to the Openpeak EFI for Inaxeon to poke through: https://s3.amazonaws.com/mevi_joggler/openpeakefi.rom

I'm interested to know what the differences are.

I loaded them both into MMTOOL. I can't see that many major differences - short of extracting all of the DXE's and diffing them. bah. can't be bothered with that tonight.

[mickchip]

When booting DSL it somtimes ends up hung on the video but not stripes, its like cross hatched 4 fiths of the way up the screen with the top black.
That's on the openpeak joggler, might butcher one of my o2 jogglers and see if there is any difference.

[pete]

I saw a text like DSL prompt once but unplugged before I realized that it had booted into DSL.

I just made one of those ultimate boot cd's with a bunch of different dos utilities on it.

It boots a number of utilities either in dos or linux. I am getting the scrambled video in Linux. So far though all of the DOS utilities appear to work.

[inaxeon]

Well this is an interesting development (Unfortunately my camera doesn't quite capture the amazing colour I'm witnessing right now):





I can only get this far about one in every 5 boots, the rest of the time it just hangs. I can't install anything because I've not managed to start the installer with any PATA device attached.

[roobarb!]

Blimey charlie.

[inaxeon]

Linux is not in a good state at the moment

Every Live CD I've tried tries to start the gma500_gfx driver, and then it's all over. Maybe I should start quizzing the Linux people on how the hang they get that thing going, because it's not a nice driver to work with. I can immediately see it's not happy about the Joggler's lack of an EDID