Ollie, an update:
We have two of these boards in systems right now,
slightly different configurations, slightly different
applications. We haven't tried booting LinuxBIOS yet,
we wanted to get familiar with them as normal system
boards first.
One board is configured for running Linux. Using all
on-board peripherals and RH7.1, at 266MHz FSB we were
seeing various hangs, sometimes even before leaving
POST. I've been out a bunch, but the guys that were working
with it said that they tried flashing the BIOS with the
latest Award from PCChips and Amptron, but the flash
utility kept failing, saying it didn't find the hardware
or something.
I can't vouch for this, but rather than try to make it work
I pulled the BIOS chip and burned it in a device programmer
with the 03/30/01 BIOS from PCChips. When I got to looking
at it today, it had a Permedia-2 card in the AGP slot,
they were trying different hardware configurations to see
if they could get it to work at 1.2GHz. I left it there
to start with. On first boot-up, with the 3/30 BIOS and
the Permedia-2, it hung before the kernel (2.4.2) went
multi-user (the hangs have been spurious and at random
places, so it's not worth mentioning exactly what it was
doing at the time). So I pulled the Permedia-2 card and
reconfigured the BIOS to allocate 64MB to the video. At
that point, it booted through to completion and stayed up
solid. Cat /proc/pci reports 1195 MHz. As far as I know,
it's still running now, a few hours later.
(This actually brings up something that I noticed with a
Matsonic board with the 630e and an 866MHz PIII, set for
a 133MHz FSB. I was having some stability problems that
went away after changing the VGA memory allocation to 64MB
from 8MB. Does this make any sense? Are these chipsets
more stable at some VGA configurations than others?
Or was this random and/or probably actually something
else that changed at the same time...?)
The other system was still balking on us, however. We
tried the same BIOS and the same video settings, but it
still hung during POST. This system is being tested with
OpenBSD 2.8, and there's no SiS 900 driver for OpenBSD, so
they were using a 3C905. Still, even when we pulled the
3C905 and booted without anything in the PCI, and later
when we tried a 3C595, the system kept hanging during
POST. We tried resetting the BIOS settings to defaults
and such, but it just wouldn't cooperate. It's failing
in POST, so I don't think that OpenBSD has anything to do
with it directly. The board works fine at 900MHz/200MHz,
and has the same memory, disk and processor as the other
system, althouh the CD and floppy/LS120 might be different,
I didn't get to check on that before leaving today.
I'll be back in the office on Wednesday (US East Coast),
but there's people there that can try some stuff if
y'all have anything you'd like us to try.
Thanks much,
--Bob Drzyzgula
