Board Testing HOWTO

This page gives you hints on how to test the LinuxBIOS support for your mainboard and all components present on the board.

We try to maintain one build tutorial / status page for every supported LinuxBIOS mainboard. The status table is always implemented using the status template in this wiki. A usage example is available, but you can also look at existing status pages.

For each item in the status table, this page describes how you can test the respective hardware part.

Legacy / Super I/O

Parallel port

• Try loading the ppdev and parport_pc kernel modules: modprobe ppdev; modprobe parport_pc. Check if there were errors using dmesg.
• Try to actually use a parallel port device (e.g. a printer).
• If there are errors/problems, please post the superiotool -dV output on the mailing list and ask the developers for help.

PC speaker

• Try to create a beep on the PC speaker. There are various ways to do that, e.g. you can use the Debian package beep (apt-get install beep).
• If that doesn't work, check that you actually have a speaker correctly attached and also try modprobe pcspkr.

Miscellaneous

Flashrom

• DO NOT ATTEMPT TO FOLLOW THESE INSTRUCTIONS UNLESS YOU KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING! THIS CAN RENDER YOUR MAINBOARD TOTALLY UNUSABLE! YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!
• To check whether flashrom knows about your chipset and ROM chip, run flashrom.
• If it says "Found chipset CHIPSETNAME..." and "CHIPNAME found at..." that's a good first sign.
• To check if you can read the existing BIOS image from the chip, run flashrom -r backup.bin.
• Now the really important part, checking if writing an image on the chip works:
  • First make sure you have a backup chip containing the original BIOS. Also, you should have verified that it actually boots your system successfully. Put away that backup chip somewhere safe.
  • Try inserting a ROM chip which you can safely overwrite (e.g. an empty one you bought). Then write an image onto the chip, which is different from what's on the chip right now: flashrom -wv new.bin. If this works and flashrom reports "VERIFIED" your board is supported by flashrom.
  • If not, you might try to enable the "Enable BIOS Update" or "Write-protect BIOS" or similar options in your BIOS CMOS menu first, or set a jumper on your board (this is highly board-dependent). Also, you might have to use the flashrom --mainboard switch for some boards.
  • If none of the above helps (but flashrom still does detect your chipset and ROM chip), there's quite likely a board-specific initialization required in flashrom, which is non-trivial to add (e.g. toggling certain custom GPIO lines etc).
• Please check/update the list of boards supported by flashrom accordingly (whether it works or does not work on your board).

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