[OLPC-devel] how to update bios to linuxbios

[Mitch Bradley]

stephen pearce wrote:
> Hi
> 1/
> Could someone tell me or direct me to a description of howto update the
> olpc development board bios from  Insy...  to linuxbios?
It's pretty complicated at present.

First you need to install Fedora on the development board.  
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Installing_Fedora_Core

That's not trivial.  In order to do it, you need a lot of USB devices - 
hub, keyboard, mouse, memory stick, network adapter, and hard drive.  I 
know from experience that some USB network adapters don't work.  You 
also need a network server and the know-how to set it up to deliver the 
Fedora installation set.

To build LinuxBIOS, follow these instructions: 
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/LinuxBIOSHowto

To install LinuxBIOS, boot Fedora on the devel board and do this: 
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Flashing_LinuxBIOS
> 2/
> What is the part number/ description for the socketed flash rom which
> goes into the development board so I can obtain one
SST 49LF008A .  It's a 1 MByte (8 Mbit) part that implements the LPC 
(Low Pin Count) interface (also known as FWH - Firmware Hub - although, 
strictly speaking, there are some small differences between the LPC and 
FWH protocols).
> 3/
> Can the red hat image be writen to usb flash rom and then used to boot
> the development board ..
The Fedora installation procedure described above wants to install to a 
USB hard disk.  I don't know if a USB flash device would be big enough.
> if so apart from copying the image .. dd to a
> usb flash drive what else is necessary to make a bootable image ..
> also is the source available for this so one could produce a reduced
> image by removing some of the code
>
> I have got puppylinux to boot on a 512 MB Cosair memory stick .. I
> tried a number of other memory sticks unsuccessfully suggesting some
> incompatibility amongst the usb interfaces on these sticks .. (same
> problems on a non olpc pc .. so I don't think it is an aberation of
> the olpc platfom
I had good luck with two different SanDisk Cruzer-Mini 1.0 GB sticks.  
But I had to put them in the USB sockets on the left side of the board.  
The Insyde BIOS wouldn't recognize the stick when it was in the 
right-side socket.

The Insyde BIOS is known to be unreliable with respect to USB operations 
on the OLPC devel board.  (It was a quick port that was done on a 
donated-time basis.)

I got PuppyLinux 2.02 to boot from the Cruzer-mini.  But I had to use a 
Mac USB keyboard; my Belkin USB keyboard wouldn't work.

I was unable to use PuppyLinux to reflash the SST FLASH part, because 
the procedure requires you to set the MSR register to a specific value.  
PuppyLinux lacks the special file "/dev/cpu/0/msr", so the "wrmsr" 
program won't work.