system hangup - I'm lost

[Jeremy Chadwick]

On Wed, Oct 01, 2008 at 06:53:09AM +0200, Oliver Lehmann wrote:
> Jeremy Chadwick wrote:
> 
> > I can't find anything on Intel's site that clues me in; all the PDFs
> > are vague as far as what chips are on the board.
> 
> Have you tried the Product specifications?

No need -- Charles Sprickman sent me high-resolution pictures of all the
ICs on the 440GX board, and I was able to identify all of them except a
few (and those are obviously bit-latches or gates of some kind, so not
important).

Here's the list:

- National Semiconductor Super I/O chip [1]
- Cirrus Logic GD5480 video/VGA chip
- Samsung SGRAM module for VGA chip; 16MBytes, 70ns
- Intel 82371EB (PIIX4E) chip [2]
- Dallas Semiconductor DS80CH11 power management chip
- EtronTech SRAM; 256kbit, 15ns
- Unknown, looks like flash or DRAM
- Intel S82093AA I/O APIC
- Octal bit-latch IC
- Intel SB21150BC PCI bridge; 66MHz
- Intel chip of some kind, can't make it out due to dust
- Texas Instrument UCC5638 SCSI terminator
- Texas Instrument UCC5638 SCSI terminator
- Cypress Semiconductor W48C101 clock chip
- Numerous other bit-latching ICs
- Cypress Semiconductor 3.3V SDRAM buffering chip; probably used to drive SDRAM DIMMs (system memory)
- ??? Model 684702-003; not sure what this does, but is of no interest
- Some TI chip, doesn't interest me
- 2x California Micro Devices ECP/EPP (parallel port) terminator
- Maxim MAX211ECA1, no idea but doesn't interest me

[1]: I'll have to look up datasheets on this chip to see if it supports
H/W monitoring.

[2]: This chip does a **lot**, the most important piece being it drives
the entire PCI bus.  It *does* support SMBus, but not I2C.  Linux
lmsensors supports this chip, but I don't know ""how"" it supports it.
I will need to look up the specs/datasheets on it
http://www.lm-sensors.org/browser/lm-sensors/trunk/doc/busses/i2c-piix4


> http://download.intel.com/support/motherboards/server/l440gx/254151-003.pdf
> 
> Beginning on page 33 (43 of the pdf)
> 
> It has 3 different Server Management busses. the temperature part is
> handled within a Baseboard Management Controller. This BMC is implemented
> using a DS82CL10.

This tells me very little.  :-)

> Because it is a Server Board it offers a lot of managing features and
> other nice things like serial console at bootup and system monitoring
> features... but all unsupported withn FreeBSDs software ;)

Really?  That's interesting, because Charles Sprickman told me that
there is no hardware monitoring information in the BIOS if you go in
there.  Most motherboards provide that in the BIOS as a centralised
place above all else.

Either way, I'm going to look into the details.  Examining what exactly
Linux lm-sensors means by "support" will be the first step.

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking                       http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                  Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.              PGP: 4BD6C0CB |