Back in style
by davidnielsen
Got myself a neat new 4400+ AMD64 X2 with 2 gigs of ram
The casing is a Shuttle machine, much to my confusion Fedora identified only one CPU, so I went back and double checked the supported CPU list for the mobo and it was supported.
Turns out that a bios upgrade was needed to turn on this feature.
The moment where my head turned blue in anger was when I discovered that award still doesn’t offer a Linux tool to flash my bios. I managed to get a bootdisk made on a Windows machine that was handy and one nervous flashing later I am now the owner of a functional SMP setup.
Why is this the case, surely we are an just as much in need of this option and I don’t plan to keep a Windows box handy to crank out bootdisks.
Anger.. yet bliss – I always wanted an smp system to play with.
System.NullReferenceException 
I am truly jealous…I wonder when my VIA C3/800 will die so that I can have some SMP goodness?!! Arghhhh! I must say, though, that I am happy that you’ve finally been able to get one. Besides myself, there is no one else I’d rather see with a nice, shiny new dual-core 64bit machine than you, David.
Cheers
Does any motherboard manufacturer offer native Linux bios flashing tools?
There’s actually no need for Windows to flash – FreeDOS will do just fine, and it’s
possible to make a FreeDOS bootable CD. Dell has Linux-friendly flashing tools,
including hard drive-based flashing options, but it uses FreeDOS. http://linux.dell.com/projects.shtml#biosdisk is the project. A generic version of this
would be a nice addition to Linux. Hmmm.
Try “flashrom” from the LinuxBIOS project:
http://www.openbios.org/viewcvs/trunk/LinuxBIOSv2/util/flashrom/
Use SVN trunk.
At worst you’ll have to add the PCI ID of the main board chipset and the ID of the flash memory part used, but it’s fairly trivial.
My patches to added support for the Intel ICH7 chipset and SST49LF040B flash part just got accepted last week.
dragoon: Thanks for that link. I’ll see if I can adapt that to my ABIT motherboard. (Who knows…it might even recognize my processor correctly as a Prescott A and not a Northwood after a BIOS upgrade; or maybe even give me HT or something…)
Anyways, congrats on the kick-ass hardware, David. You definitely deserve it. (Although I must say I’m slightly jealous. :P) Just of curiosity: are you running x86 (32-bit) or x86-64 (64-bit)?
Take it easy…