| |
| This HOWTO contains instructions for using LinuxBIOSv2 on the VIA EPIA-M and MII |
| mini-itx based motherboards. |
| |
| Version 1.0 initial write for LinuxBIOSv2 by Nick Barker |
| |
| Using materials and inspiration from |
| - EPIA HOWTO for freebios/linuxbios by Mark Wilkinson |
| - Based on the K7SEM HOWTO by Brenden Bixler, |
| - which is based on the Sis 630 HOWTO by Ron Minnich. |
| - Getting Started with freebios2 - a mail posting by Jay Miller |
| |
| Unfortunately, there is a step in this HOWTO that could be hazardous. The |
| hazards include (but are not limited to) |
| 1) destroying your motherboard |
| 2) hurting yourself |
| 3) killing yourself |
| |
| Because of these hazards, you must take full responsibility if you |
| decide to install LinuxBIOSv2 following these procedures. Neither the |
| author of this HOWTO or any organisation or individual associated with |
| the LinuxBIOSv2 project can be held responsible for any adverse consequences |
| of your attempt to follow these procedures. |
| |
| WARNING: We assume you've built kernels, know how to open up your PC, |
| and how to yank the flash part out while power is on and put in a |
| different part. There is NO WARRANTY, express or implied, with this |
| software. In fact, if you don't know what you're doing, and you get |
| careless, you're going to end up with a nice paperweight instead of a |
| motherboard, an emergency room bill, or a funeral service. |
| |
| YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED. |
| |
| Additional information available at: http://www.linuxbios.org/ |
| |
| Linux distribution: Most modern distributions are supported. |
| |
| Other software notes: You MUST have 'as' version 2.9.5 or later. |
| You MUST have 'gcc' version other than 2.96. |
| |
| |
| Pre-requisites |
| -------------- |
| |
| Before you start there are a few things which you need to arrange: |
| |
| Since you are going to be re-programming the flash rom on the mainboard, and |
| it is likely that you first few attempts / images will not be right, then |
| you need a way of restoring a known working bios onto a board which is otherwise |
| dead. |
| |
| Recommended: you might want to get a Bios Saviour (RD1-PL) - this is |
| a handy little piggy-back flash chip that saves you destroying the original |
| flash image. This howto assumes that you have this device, though other methods |
| and devices exist for programming flash roms. |
| |
| LinuxBIOSv2 sends debugging output through the first serial port. You might want |
| to arrange a null modem serial cable for connecting this serial port to a |
| second computer running a terminal emulation program. I use 'microcom' which |
| is simple and allows all output to be captured into a file for later analysis. |
| The port is set up to use 115200 baud, 8bit, No parity, 1 stop bit. |
| |
| Under LinuxBIOSv2 you have a choice of 'payloads'. The payload is the program |
| which LinuxBIOSv2 hands over to once it has finished initialising everything |
| on the mainboard at boot time. The payload is included in the flash rom along |
| with LinuxBIOSv2, and usually its function is to locate and load the operating |
| system. The 2 most common payloads are FILO, for booting Linux off an IDE |
| disk, and Etherboot for booting a diskless workstation accross a network. |
| This howto assumes the use of FILO. |
| |
| A vga bios image. LinuxBIOS2v2 uses the vga bios of the original Via BIOS to |
| initialise the vga. It is not directly downloadable, but you can capture it from |
| a system running with the original bios, so you might as well capture it now: |
| dd if=/dev/mem of=/video.bios.bin \ |
| bs=1 count=65536 skip=790528 |
| |
| |
| Getting Going |
| ------------- |
| |
| The steps for loading LinuxBIOSv2 are simple: |
| 1) Get Linux installed on your machine. |
| 2) Download and install LinuxBIOSv2 sources. |
| 3) Understand how to flash your rom. |
| 4) Download, Configure and build the FILO payload |
| 5) Configure and build LinuxBIOSv2. |
| 6) Burn the LinuxBIOSv2 image to the flash. |
| 7) Reset the machine -- did it work? |
| |
| Options Once it has booted |
| i) Speeding up the boot |
| ii) Enhancing ACPI support |
| iii) On EPIA-MII, booting the computer from on-board compact flash |
| |
| |
| Step 1) |
| Get Linux installed on your LinuxBIOSv2 machine. |
| Don't forget to note which partition is / (/dev/hda3 etc.) |
| |
| |
| Step 2) |
| Grab the LinuxBIOSv2 source. |
| cd to the directory you want the source tree to be. |
| |
| Note: this will create a sub directory called LinuxBIOSv2 which contains |
| the LinuxBIOSv2 source code |
| |
| Download the latest code for LinuxBIOSv2 from the downloads page at |
| http://www.linuxbios.org |
| |
| |
| having expanded the tarball, cd into the LinuxBIOSv2 directory and browse around. |
| The top level directory includes: |
| |
| 'src' - where all of the source files for LinuxBIOSv2 are located. |
| 'targets' - where all of the platform specific configuration files |
| for each platform supported by LinuxBIOSv2 are kept, and |
| where the build files and build process occur. |
| 'util' - where various utilities required for the build process |
| and debugging are kept. |
| |
| |
| Hereafter, this howto refers to directory locations relative to these directories, |
| unless an absolute pathlist is given. |
| |
| Step 3) |
| Whilst getting LinuxBIOSv2 going on your EPIA-M, you are almost |
| certainly going to be re-programming the flash rom several times, and |
| there is a very high probability that at one of these stages you will |
| get a flash rom that fails to boot your mainboard into Linux. |
| |
| Before we proceed any further, it is absolutley vital that you have |
| worked out how to program the flash chip, and how you are going to |
| get back to your original bios when things go wrong. Otherwise you |
| will end up with a very expensive paper weight as described earlier. |
| |
| You can use a professional Data I/O burner, or you can be foolhardy |
| and simply re-program the flash part of a running machine. However |
| whilst getting going a BIOS SAVIOUR RD1-PL is a very inexpensive |
| but effective device for ensuring that you always have a working |
| BIOS to hand. |
| |
| The bios saviour is a little device which plugs into the flash rom |
| socket of the motherboard, and the original flash rom then plugs into |
| the bios saviour. The bios saviour includes a second flash rom chip, |
| and either of these chips can be selected as the active chip by a |
| simple supplied electrical switch mounted on flying leads. Make |
| sure that this switch is clearly visible, so that you know which |
| chip you are booting from, and which chip you are about to re-program. |
| |
| Decide which chip you are going to use for LinuxBIOSv2, and which chip |
| you are going to keep the original working bios in, and mark them |
| clearly on this switch. |
| |
| In the 'util/flash_and_burn' directory is the source for the 'flash_rom' |
| utility, which is great for re-programming the flash chips on the |
| EPIA-M / MII. Once you have built this utility: |
| |
| Make sure that it can detect both flash chips on the bios saviour: |
| with switch set to chip 1 run 'flash_rom' |
| flash rom should search through a list of known flash rom |
| device types until it finds the type of the original chip |
| from your EPIA-M, and report what it has found. |
| |
| with the switch set to chip 2, run 'flash_rom' again and confirm |
| that it can 'see' the second flash chip. |
| |
| If your are lucky, the actual part number of the 2 chips may |
| be different, which you can use just prior to re-programming |
| a chip to make sure you are programming the right chip. |
| |
| Make sure that you can read / write and verify a flash chip: |
| with switch set to 1 (original BIOS) run |
| 'flash_rom -r original.rom' |
| this should read the contents of the original bios into the |
| file original.rom |
| |
| confirm that the newly read file matches the original bios |
| 'flash_rom -v original.rom' |
| |
| set the switch to 2 |
| confirm if you can that flash_rom 'sees' the second chip |
| 'flash_rom' - and look for the detected device type |
| |
| write the known good bios to the second chip with |
| 'flash_rom -w original.bios' |
| |
| verify that it has written correctly |
| 'flash_rom -v original.rom' |
| |
| with switch left at position 2, reboot the machine and make |
| sure that it comes up corectly. If it does then you now have |
| a working flash programming environment. If it does not, then |
| set the switch back to 1, reboot the machine, and investigate |
| further. |
| |
| Step 4) |
| Download FILO from http://felixx.tsn.or.jp/~ts1/filo, and expand |
| |
| In the FILO source directory, type 'make' |
| |
| The first invocation of make builds the default Config file, which |
| should be edited to meet your needs. In particular look at the line: |
| |
| "AUTOBOOT_FILE ...." |
| |
| and make sure that it looks sensible for your setup. The line |
| AUTOBOOT_FILE "hda1:/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda2 console=ttyS0,115200" |
| reads as: |
| - find a linux os image on device hda partion 1 called vmlinuz, |
| - load this image |
| - execute the image passing kernel command line parameters of: |
| "root=/dev/hda2 console=ttyS0,115200" |
| |
| after editing Config, type 'make' again, and this will build the file |
| 'filo.elf' which is the payload we will be using. |
| |
| Copy this file to somewhere which the LinuxBIOSv2 makefile can easily |
| find it. I just tend to keep it in the root directory though I'm sure |
| others will condem me for that practise: |
| 'cp filo.elf /' |
| |
| Make sure that you have compiled a kernel bzImage, and copied it to |
| the file location you identified in the FILO Config file. |
| |
| |
| Step 5) |
| The next step is to create the build environment for the epia-m. This |
| step creates the appropriate makefiles and build directories for the |
| epia-m. |
| |
| 'cd targets' |
| './buildtarget via/epia-m' |
| |
| This step will create a subdirectory in the targets/via/epia-m |
| directory called epia-m, which is the build directory for LinuxBIOSv2. |
| |
| The main configuration file for the epia-m is in |
| 'targets/via/epia-m/Config.lb' |
| |
| If you need to make any changes to the configuration, for example you wish to |
| locate filo.elf in a place other than '/filo.elf', or during the more advanced |
| steps of this HOWTO, then these changes are made to this file. |
| |
| You need to re-run the './buildtartegt via/epia-m' after any such change. |
| |
| The directory 'targets/via/epia-m' contains other sample Config.lb files, any |
| of which can be copied through to Config.lb in order to become the current |
| configuration. |
| |
| Once you have your Config.lb set up to your needs, and the build environment |
| created with './buildtarget', it is time to build a rom image. |
| |
| Change directory into the build directory 'targets/via/epia-m/epia-m' |
| |
| The configuration as set up by the buildtarget process will create a LinuxBIOS |
| which is exactly 196608 bytes long, which is exactly 64K bytes short of what |
| needs to go into the 256K flash rom. The other 64K is for your vga bios |
| which is simply merged with the linuxbios image. The easiest way to make this |
| happen is to edit the Makefile and change the line |
| |
| cat fallback/linuxbios.rom > linuxbios.rom |
| |
| to |
| |
| cat /video.bios.bin fallback/linuxbios.rom >linuxbios.rom |
| |
| Note: the above order of merging the files together is critical |
| |
| You will need to remember to make this change every time after you have run |
| the buildtarget program. |
| |
| Type 'make', and wait for the build process to complete. |
| |
| If all went well, then you should find a file 'linuxbios.rom' in your |
| current directory. Check that it is 262144 bytes long - i.e. exactly the right |
| size for the flash rom chip in your EPIA-M / MII. |
| |
| |
| |
| Step 6) |
| NOTE: BE ADVISED THAT THIS STEP CAN KILL YOUR MOTHERBOARD ! |
| IF YOU DO NOT HAVE A MEANS OF RECOVERING FROM FLASHING YOUR BIOS, |
| YOU MAY/WILL BE LEFT WITH A DEAD MACHINE. |
| |
| |
| Assuming that you are using a Bios Saviour, make sure that the switch is set |
| to the position for your LinuxBIOSv2 image. |
| |
| Type 'flash_rom' to make sure it can see the flash chip, and verify its type if |
| possible. |
| |
| Only once you are happy that you are about to re-programme the desired chip, type |
| 'flash_rom -w linuxbios.rom', and wait the few seconds it takes to program it. |
| |
| Once it has finished, verify that the chip was re-rogrammed correctly - type |
| 'flash_rom -v linuxbios.rom' |
| |
| |
| |
| Step 7) |
| Power cycle the machine. LinuxBIOSv2 should come up in a few seconds. |
| |
| With a connection to the serial port set at 115200, you should see LinuxBIOSv2 |
| come up, launch FILO, and if you have a timeout set in FILO, then it may be |
| waiting for you to confirm its boot command line. |
| |
| As long as you have this command line set up correctly, and an os image in the |
| right place, then FILO should proceed to boot into your Linux os. |
| |
| If you do, CONGRATULATIONS ! It WORKED ! Pat yourself on the back, |
| why not try the optional steps now ? |
| |
| If you don't, time to start capturing the output of the serial port |
| and talking to the linuxbios mailing list. |
| |
| |
| Optional steps - for use only if step 7 was successfull. |
| |
| OK so now we have a BIOS which boots your computer fully into the operating system, and |
| depending upon your needs that may be all that you want. However LinuxBIOSv2 has a few more |
| tricks up its sleeve should you find yourself hungry for more. |
| |
| Speeding up the boot |
| -------------------- |
| |
| Linuxbios sends its debugging output to the first serial port and, depending upon the amount of debug |
| output selected, can be the limiting factor in the speed with which it boots your computer - regardless |
| of whether you have anything attached to the serial port. |
| |
| Linuxbios uses the notion of debug levels to control what is sent to the serial port. These levels |
| range from 0 to 9 with 0 being the least verbose and 9 being the most verbose. |
| |
| These levels are defined in the Config.lb file described earlier. To reduce the output set: |
| option MAXIMUM_CONSOLE_LOGLEVEL=8 |
| option DEFAULT_CONSOLE_LOGLEVEL=8 |
| to lower values. |
| |
| Next you will have to run 'buildtarget' again to propagate the effects of the config change. |
| Then edit your Makefile again to include your video bios in the final merging. |
| |
| Then run 'make clean' followed by 'make'. |
| |
| |
| Advanced ACPI |
| ------------- |
| |
| LinuxBIOSv2 now supports ACPI on the epia-m and epia-m II. In particular the interrupt |
| processing in Linux can be done through ACPI, and crude power management support |
| is provided. This includes software power off, and power management events from the |
| power button. |
| |
| It is possible to enhance this behaviour to provide the full capabilities of the |
| original BIOS, which includes different sleep levels and wake from these levels |
| upon certain events. This is achieved by using a 'grabbed' copy of the ACPI |
| Differentiated System Descriptor Table or DSDT from the original BIOS. |
| |
| For copyright reasons this table cannot be included with the source distribution |
| of LinuxBIOSv2. |
| |
| |
| You MUST have 'iasl' - Intel's ACPI Asl compiler for Unix/Linux - |
| http://developer.intel.com/technology/iapc/acpi/downloads.htm. |
| |
| |
| To replace the LinuxBIOSv2 DSDT with the grabbed one from the original BIOS: |
| |
| - Start the computer using the original BIOS, and make sure that you |
| have ACPI set up in the kernel that you are running |
| |
| - Grab the DSDT table - 'cat /proc/acpi/dsdt >dsdt.aml' |
| - Convert to asl code - 'iasl -d dsdt.aml' (creates dsdt.dsl) |
| - Convert it to a C hex table - 'iasl -tc dsdt.dsl' (creates dsdt.hex) |
| - Replace the file 'src/mainboard/via/epia-m/dsdt.c with dsdt.hex |
| |
| Now re-build LinuxBIOSv2, re-program the flash and power cycle. |
| |
| If you wish to return to the LinuxBIOSv2 DSDT, then the original file dsdt.asl can be converted |
| into a C hex file using 'iasl -tc dsdt.asl' |
| |
| |
| |
| Boot from Onboard Compact Flash (MII only) |
| ------------------------------------------ |
| |
| LinuxBIOSv2 now supports the onboard compact flash on the MII as an IDE drive, |
| and it is possible to boot directly from this drive using the following steps. |
| |
| The first step is to get Filo or whatever payload you are using to recognise |
| and use this device. |
| |
| In order that the pcmcia subsystem of the Linux kernel can correctly configure |
| the device later on in the boot process the CF is set up with its I/O |
| registers in a contiguous block of 16 bytes at 0x1e0 through 0x1ef. Unfortunately |
| this is not a standard IDE address which is why we need to 'fix' filo to use it. |
| (Actually it is half of the address range used by IDE4, and so we need to |
| be careful to tell the kernel not to probe that address - more on that later). |
| |
| The first step is to change the filo Config file. |
| 1) Comment out SUPPORT_PCI=1. This line instructs filo to search for PCI based IDE |
| adapters only, and the CF is not attached to a PCI based IDE controller. |
| 2) Add the following two lines somewhere in the Config file: |
| IDE2_CMD = 0x1e0 |
| IDE2_CNTRL =0x1ec |
| |
| |
| The second step is to modify the file drivers/ide.c in the filo source directory. |
| Find the function 'find_ide_controller_compat' and change it to look like |
| |
| static int find_ide_controller_compat(struct controller *ctrl, int index) |
| { |
| if (index >= IDE_MAX_CONTROLLERS) |
| return -1; |
| #ifdef IDE2_CMD |
| if(index == 2){ |
| ctrl->cmd_base = IDE2_CMD; |
| ctrl->ctrl_base = IDE2_CNTRL; |
| return 0; |
| } |
| #endif |
| ctrl->cmd_base = ide_base[index]; |
| ctrl->ctrl_base = ide_base[index] + IDE_REG_EXTENDED_OFFSET; |
| return 0; |
| } |
| Filo will now recognise the CF as the first device on the third IDE controller |
| (i.e. ide2), and can be referred to as 'hde' |
| |
| |
| The next step is to create an initrd file for your Linux kernel. What? Why? |
| The CF socket on your MII is hardwired to the PCMCIA controller and for all intents |
| and purposes it is a PCMCIA device. This means that once Linux boots it will be under |
| the control of the pcmcia manager. Now according to the pcmcia-utils documentation, |
| the pcmcia manager is intended to control and configure devices on an already |
| running system. Yet if we need the CF to be the root device, it needs to be mounted |
| very early on in the boot sequence, before the stage where pcmcia devices would normally |
| be configured. The answer is to use an initrd file to get the pcmcia manager running early |
| for the CF. If you are unfamiliar with initrd then 'man initrd' will give you more background. |
| |
| |
| The easiest way to create an initrd is to use the script 'mkcfinitrd' which is at the bottom |
| of this howto. This is a tailored version of the 'pcinitrd' script from the pcmcia-utils package. |
| Make sure that 'ash' is available on your system as this is the tiny shell programme used during |
| the initrd phase of booting. |
| |
| It is worth mounting the initrd generated, and looking over it to make sure that |
| it contains all of the modules necessary to load and initialise the CF. It does not |
| need drivers for whatever you use in the pcmcia socket, as that can be initialised |
| later on in the boot process as before. |
| |
| Finally gzip the file created, and move it alongside your kernel. |
| |
| Next adjust your FILO command line to pick things up from the CF. My linux command |
| line in filo looks like: |
| |
| AUTOBOOT_FILE = "hde:/vmlinuz initrd=hde:/initrd.gz root=/dev/hde console=tty0 ide4=noprobe" |
| |
| The ide4=noprobe option is required to stop the kernel from probing the address used |
| by the CF. As this address is half that used as the standard address for a fifth (i.e. ide4) |
| controller, the kernel hangs whilst trying to initialise this device if this option |
| is not given. |
| |
| Finally make sure that you have copied the necessary files onto your CF, and re-boot |
| your computer. |
| |
| |
| |
| ******************* mkcfinitrd script ************************************** |
| #!/bin/sh |
| # |
| # Utility for constructing CF initrd for Epia-MII CF Boot |
| # |
| # Copyright (C) 2005 Nick Barker -- nick.barker9@btinternet.com |
| # |
| # Based on pcinitrd |
| # Copyright (C) 1999 David A. Hinds -- dahinds@users.sourceforge.net |
| |
| SIZE=2400 |
| MODULES="pcmcia/pcmcia_core.o pcmcia/ds.o pcmcia/yenta_socket.o" |
| BLK="kernel/drivers/ide/legacy/ide-cs.o" |
| KERNEL=`uname -r` |
| MODDIR=/lib/modules/$KERNEL |
| BIN="bin/mount bin/umount sbin/insmod sbin/cardmgr" |
| LIB=`ls /lib/libc.so.? | sort | tail -1` |
| ETC="/etc/ld.so.cache /etc/pcmcia/config /etc/pcmcia/config.opts" |
| DEV="/dev/console /dev/null /dev/ram /dev/tty1 /dev/tty2 /dev/tty3 /dev/tty4" |
| MNT=/tmp/initrd.mnt |
| |
| # name of the initrd file to make |
| TARGET=/tmp/initrd |
| |
| fail() |
| { |
| umount $MNT |
| rmdir $MNT |
| exit 1 |
| } |
| trap fail SIGTERM SIGINT |
| |
| strip_cp() |
| { |
| if [ -d $3 ] ; then |
| DEST=$3/`basename $2` |
| else |
| DEST=$3 |
| fi |
| strip $1 --verbose -o $DEST $2 | sed -e 's/([^ ]*)//g' || fail |
| } |
| |
| mkdir --verbose $MNT || exit 1 |
| |
| echo "Creating filesystem on $TARGET" |
| if [ -b $TARGET ] ; then |
| rm $TARGET || fail |
| fi |
| |
| dd if=$ROOT/dev/zero of=$TARGET bs=1k count=$SIZE |
| echo "y" | mke2fs $TARGET $SIZE >/dev/null || fail |
| mount --verbose -t ext2 -o loop $TARGET $MNT || fail |
| |
| |
| rm -rf $MNT/lost+found |
| echo "Creating Directories on $TARGET" |
| for DIR in bin dev etc lib proc tmp mnt ; do |
| mkdir --verbose $MNT/$DIR || fail |
| done |
| for DIR in block misc fs net pcmcia ; do |
| mkdir --verbose $MNT/lib/$DIR || fail |
| done |
| |
| echo "Copying Files to $TARGET" |
| for F in $DEV ; do |
| cp -a --verbose /$F $MNT/dev || fail |
| done |
| if [ -e /dev/systty ] ; then |
| cp -a --verbose /dev/systty $MNT/dev || fail |
| fi |
| |
| for F in $BIN ; do |
| strip_cp --strip-all /$F $MNT/bin |
| done |
| strip_cp --strip-all /bin/ash $MNT/bin/sh |
| |
| for F in $LIB ; do |
| strip_cp --strip-debug /$F $MNT/lib |
| done |
| cp --verbose /lib/ld-linux.so.? $MNT/lib || fail |
| |
| for F in $ETC ; do |
| cp --verbose /$F $MNT/etc || fail |
| done |
| for F in scsi network ftl ide memory serial ; do |
| touch $MNT/etc/$F ; chmod +x $MNT/etc/$F |
| done |
| |
| for MOD in $MODULES ; do |
| strip_cp --strip-debug $MODDIR/$MOD $MNT/lib/$MOD |
| done |
| |
| strip_cp --strip-debug $MODDIR/$BLK $MNT/lib/block/ide-cs.o |
| |
| echo "Creating linuxrc startup script" |
| cat > $MNT/linuxrc <<- 'EOF' |
| #!/bin/sh |
| |
| mount -t proc /proc /proc |
| |
| echo "" |
| echo "==== initrd: starting PCMCIA services ====" |
| echo "" |
| PC=/lib/pcmcia |
| insmod $PC/pcmcia_core.o |
| insmod $PC/yenta_socket.o |
| insmod $PC/ds.o |
| insmod /lib/block/ide-cs.o |
| if [ "$DEBUG" != "" ] ; then V=-v ; fi |
| cardmgr $V -q -o -c /etc -m /lib -s /tmp/stab -p /tmp/pid |
| umount /proc |
| echo "" |
| |
| if [ "$DEBUG" != "" ] ; then |
| /bin/sh < /dev/console |
| fi |
| EOF |
| chmod +x $MNT/linuxrc |
| |
| df -P $MNT | awk '/tmp/ { printf "%dK/%dK used\n",$3,$2 }' |
| umount $VERBOSE $MNT |
| rmdir $MNT |
| echo "Finished $TARGET" |
| echo "Now gzip $TARGET to create final initrd.gz" |
| exit 0 |
| |
| *************************** end mkcfinitrd *********************************** |