Re: [nwst-dev] Happy new year and question

[Jochen R. <jo...@pa...>]

Hello all and happy new year,

> I hope you all are starting this new year well, even though looking at the
> amount of traffic here, people seems to be busy on other things, lets see if
> we have more time in the future.

Yes -- I've been busy looking for contract work, and I had less time to play
with the NS than I would have wanted.

> I'm currently trying to find the info needed to init the S3, Jochen, do you
> have any info on this that could be shared?

I have some work in progress there, mostly copying initialization sequences
from the cyberfb driver and others. I also got some used vga cards with the
same chip to test this on x86. I hope to have something ready real soon now...

> Also, we have bought a couple of 64 MB SIMMS with the idea of using them on
> the machine, I have tested this on a PC and it recognices the mem ok, but
> the NC only recognices 32 megs total mem. The problem is on the NC firmware,
> Linux recognices what the NC tells him, so... I was wondering if one could
> reprogram the machine to use the 128 Megs?

I was thinking of doing the same, but I was going to wait until I have time
to make the DRAM work -- too many loose ends on my plate already as it is.

The 82660 bridge chip set needs to be programmed with different dram width
settings, and the bank size registers need to be doubled from the 64 MB values.
I doubt that it is possible to change this from the kernel, unless we use the
video memory as a temporary program buffer.

There are two options to modify the firmware, as far as I can see: Go and
patch the binary with the proper values, or write something new from scratch.

I have written new firmware for the 8362 that boots off of the IDE disk I
attached to the unpopulated interface, but a few things are missing. The most
glaring problem is initializing the Ethernet chip and finding the MAC address.
Which leads to the problem of the i2c eeprom access, etc, etc.

Jochen