Mailing List Archive: syslinux: users

more on firmware loading need

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RMMcDowell at comcast

Sep 30, 2007, 2:04 PM

Post #1 of 2 (992 views)
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more on firmware loading need

Axel and everyone

Your questions are valid. I had similar question when I bought these
cards. These cards in particular have no rom chip on the pci card. If
you plug these into a computer they do nothing until you load them with
there firmware. When vt6410 are used on motherboards not as stand alone
cards the bios has this firmware and loads it into the chip set on boot
making them show up and function using the linux driver for via ide
controllers. In the case of add on cards the bios usually doesn't have
this firmware included. In win land the driver includes this firmware
and loads it on initialazion of hardware. On linux we do this same sort
of thing with wifi cards but i found no reference to using this for an
ide controller. I only found reference to updating mainboard bios to
include this firmware to be loaded. The particular board I have doesn't
have enough space left to make this happen. I'm hoping to use syslinux
to chain load the firmware loading then boot linux. I'm no expert at all
of the options or possibilities that syslinux has. I'm hoping that this
is possible. Or someone has another solution. I don't like scrapping
hardware even if it cost very little. As for using kernel 2.6.22...I
wish. At this point I'm trying to use dban with minimal rework time at
this point that doesn't seem to be happening. He has a beta version
which meet most of my requirements but wraps his initrd/root inside his
kernel using lzma to compress/uncompress the whole thing. His
kernel(2.6.20.7) should see the card but without the firmware no
functionality. I was hoping to keep this project simple. Now it seems
I'm going to recompile the whole thing to get/add the functions/features
I need. I might as well do a fork of dban just to get it were I think it
should be. I tried this card in my main desktop system which runs debian
lenny standard kernel (2.6.21whatever) and it shows the card in lspci
but doesn't create /proc/ide/hd* for any of the channels. I had known
good hardrives plugged into the card at the time.

I'm sorry that this post has moved away from only syslinux specific help
but I hope this backround helps other in understanding what I hope to
complete. If syslinux can load firmware that would solve most of my
issues at this point. Again any ideas would be great considering the
stress I've created for myself.

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count-linux at flatline

Sep 30, 2007, 2:35 PM

Post #2 of 2 (909 views)
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Re: more on firmware loading need [In reply to]

Hello Ryan,

I fail to see why you would need a firmware for the vt6410 - at least
not for basic IDE functionality.

Please try "modprobe via82cxxx" in Debian (etch or lenny for that
matter) and see wether this changes anything (dmesg might be interesting
as well).

Seeing a device via lspci only means that it can be seen on the PCI bus,
and maybe that a device name is known for the vendor/device ID
combination - nothing more, especially not about driver support.

That said, if the above doesn't help, you probably would have a chance
with some c32 code to load a firmware into the card(s), but getting this
done in a (custom) initrd in linux might be far easier (i.e.
time-efficient).

Br,

Andreas

--
flatline IT services - Andreas Kotes - Tailored solutions for your IT needs

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