[OLPC-devel] Minutes OLPC BIOS meeting, 2006-08-16

[Ray.Tseng at quantatw.com]

Richard,
	1) DOS flash utility takes 45 secs to reflash the 1MB SPI. It's SST SPI ROM. Spansion SPI ROM should be better because page programming.
	2) PS/2 keyboard work under a special version InsydeBIOS. If you look at main.c that ENE Dennis sent.      
delay(100);
	KBC_Work();
delay(500);
	printf("=============================================================\r\n");
	printf("Operation OK, system Halt...\r\n");
	printf("Please remove all powers of this system, and power it again..\r\n");
	printf("=============================================================\r\n");
	while (1);
	return 0x00;	
	
	The experiment show PS/2 keyboard (Ctrl+Alt+Del) does not work, USB keyboard (Ctrl+Alt+Del) works.


Ray Tseng 8/17/06 

-----Original Message-----
From: devel-bounces at laptop.org [mailto:devel-bounces at laptop.org] On Behalf Of Mitch Bradley
Sent: Thursday, August 17, 2006 10:37 AM
To: devel at laptop.org
Subject: [OLPC-devel] Minutes OLPC BIOS meeting, 2006-08-16

OLPC BIOS meeting, 2006-08-16

Present: Richard, Jim, Jordan, Ray, Marcello, Mitch (scribe)

Jordan - definitely having audio problem "Couldn't initialize codec".
Doesn't think it's the interrupt problem, but not sure what it is.
It's as if the codec is not there.  Perhaps LinuxBIOS is not turning on something magic.

Action item for Jordan - post the bug report to the devel list.

Marcello says that harmless codec read failures have occurred in the past.

Need to give Jayah a head's up about the situation.

State of fbdev driver:  The NOVGA patch irritates Qemu.  The fbdev driver is no problem.  Paranoia about VGA.  Decision: don't worry about Qemu; optimize for the OLPC hardware.

Regarding the Insyde BIOS expiration (on Aug 26): we would like to be able to switch over to LinuxBIOS before then, without interfering with anybody's development.  There is a workaround - use the BIOS setup screen to turn back the clock, and use NTP to set the clock under Linux.  We need to get people switched over to LinuxBIOS to flush out bugs.

Xorg.conf - option nocompression need to be turned on.  But the compression forces a power of 2 pitch, which causes each line to take up 8K, which wastes a lot of memory on OLPC (about 4M).  But the compression really helps from a bandwidth standpoint.  So most other platforms would prefer compression.

Jim's take: for now, compress to save bandwidth, burn the space.

Which display mode?  Patch has been sent to David.  1200x900 mode is hijacked to be either a VGA (85Hz) version or a DCON (50Hz) version.

Action item: Need to recalculate the VGA frequency - 85 is too high.

Mary Lou is scheduled to arrive with a DCON tomorrow.

PS/2 works on LinuxBIOS but not on Insyde.

olpcflash - takes 11 minutes to FLASH SPI.  Ray says it should take 1 minute.
The part data sheet says that it takes 1.4 ms to program 256 bytes.
That works out to 6 seconds for 1 MByte.  Clocking in the Page Program instruction with 256 bytes of payload takes 32 + (256*8) = 2079 clocks.  At 1 MHz SPI clock rate, that would add about 8 seconds to the time (neglecting the shorter miscellaneous setup writes).  At 25 MHz, the extra time would be insignificant.

We need to check for bogus images before committing the FLASH write.
Discussion of techniques.  Some combination of looking for a signature in the ID block and checksumming.

Ray wants an option to program the EC area too.  Richard will call it the --brick option.

AIs for Richard: image verification, --brick option, speed up programming.

Pulling KBC out of reset after programming SPI causes system reset.  
Rays says
that the DOS SPI programming utility displays a message telling you to reboot the system.  Ray has a version of Insyde BIOS that works with PS/2.

Action item for Ray: feed back more information about keyboard reset.

We have had a number of requests from Brazil, so we could use a Portugese translation of the instructions.

Marcello: ship buildrom binary in Fedora.

Mitch: suggested a dd-able installation.

Marcello: something like that exists

Mitch: until it's documented on the wiki, it doesn't count

Jim: will get someone going on an easy installation procedure directly to a 256MB (or so) USB key.

_______________________________________________
Devel mailing list
Devel at laptop.org
http://mailman.laptop.org/mailman/listinfo/devel