From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from 66.239.25.20.ptr.us.xo.net ([66.239.25.20] helo=zoot.lnxi.com) by canuck.infradead.org with esmtps (Exim 4.54 #1 (Red Hat Linux)) id 1Ep9HB-00015l-2E for linux-mtd@lists.infradead.org; Wed, 21 Dec 2005 14:05:29 -0500 To: Dave Peterson References: <200512201642.05224.dsp@llnl.gov> <200512211037.17680.dsp@llnl.gov> From: ebiederman@lnxi.com (Eric W. Biederman) Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2005 12:05:20 -0700 In-Reply-To: <200512211037.17680.dsp@llnl.gov> (Dave Peterson's message of "Wed, 21 Dec 2005 10:37:17 -0800") Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Cc: linux-mtd@lists.infradead.org Subject: Re: ichxrom driver question List-Id: Linux MTD discussion mailing list List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Dave Peterson writes: > On Tuesday 20 December 2005 17:40, Eric W. Biederman wrote: >> Hmm. Immediately after the erase operation you should see all f's. > > I tried it a few times. My recollection is that after the first > attempt at erasing, the first part of the flash memory contained > all f's and the rest contained data that appeared to be the old BIOS. > On a subsequent attempt, I saw all zeros, and this is what I still > see when I try to flash the BIOS again. > >> The only thing I can think of that might trigger what you are seeing >> is a cached flash chip. > > What does "cached flash chip" mean? I have very little familiarity > with how these flash chips operate. The flash chips contents being cached in the cpus cache. cat /proc/mtrr and see if covers the 0xfff80000 - 0xffffffff range where your flash chip lives. >> The ICH3-S is more of a conduit. The usual questions are: >> >> Is there motherboard specific magic that denies writes? >> What is the actual flash chip you are flashing. > > How do I determine whether there is motherboard-specific magic? Usually I see if I can read out the id on the flash chip. That tests to see if writes make it to the device because you have to write a command. > The motherboard is a Supermicro P4DPR-iGM and the flash chip is an > Intel 82802AB. Ok. That is one of the configurations I have tested although I haven't gone back and regression tested on one of those boards in a while. >> Except for the possibility of bad cache I can't think of anything >> that would cause the wrong data to be written. Are you certain >> you have a good flash image? > > The flash image I tried to install was an exact duplicate of the > currently installed flash image, obtained as follows: > > # dd if=/dev/mtd0 of=bios_image > > I was just testing the BIOS flashing mechanism to see if it worked. Ok. That sounds sane. Are you running linuxbios right now or something else? Eric