Intel P43 chipset, HD audio, RTL8169 - A user review

[Golffies]

Hello,

Yesterday, I enjoyed booting Menuet on a motherboard equipped with:

an AMD GPU compatible with VESA VBE 2.0/3.0;
an Intel P43 chipset, with its UHCI and EHCI USB controllers,
and with its HDA audio controller,
a Realtek 8169/8111C network controller,
a PATA HDD formatted as FAT32 on a single primary partition,
and... a high-capacity floppy drive.

I was absolutely unable to crash the system, and on that point, I take my hat off to the author. It’s really gratifying that the publicly available version of your work is stable. Well done!

Here is a list of the issues observed, despite carefully updating the boot parameters in the config.mnt file:

no access to the VBE screen resolutions supported by both my GPU and monitor, other than the four fallback resolutions offered at boot (the desktop therefore displayed at best in 1280x960);
no functional USB devices (keyboard, mouse, gamepad, USB stick); USB 'legacy support' in this machine’s BIOS was disabled and USB controllers were enabled;
no Ethernet traffic received, despite manually configuring the network settings in the configuration file; yet one of the utilities confirmed that the 8169 controller was indeed enabled;
the HDA sound controller was not detected;
the PATA HDD was not detected.

The lack of support for the FAT32 partition on the PATA HDD, and for USB Mass Storage, forced me to stop my tests there, as it was impossible for me to supply Menuet with external files.

Are these hardware detection issues normal, given the current state of the project, or do I have some leeway to make the existing drivers better accept the various controllers (Ethernet, audio, PATA)? One setting I found particularly difficult to decide on was this one:

network_config = 0x03f80400 # Bits 16- Com port
# Bits 08- Com IRQ
# Bit 07 Server assigned
# Bits 00- Interface 0=disabled
# 3=ethernet

As a last resort, is it possible to swap the system floppy disk for another one containing data once the OS has booted, or does the system floppy disk need to be present at all times?

[Golffies]

Hi!

The attached screenshot proves one thing: USB Mass Storage does indeed work; that’s what allowed me to export the picture to a USB flash drive. The trick to getting USB devices recognised is that you must plug them into a USB port on the motherboard, NOT on an external hub (in my case, to avoid a mess of cables, many devices are plugged into the monitor’s hub).

And so, here is what the control panels show regarding the Realtek Ethernet adapter’s activity: in theory, the RTL8169/811C is correctly identified by the driver, and the IP layer is manually configured with the correct settings for this subnet (/26). But the received packets are not being captured. In the setup control panel, strangely enough, I can’t force a name other than the Intel driver’s, but this is probably just a cosmetic issue; in config.mnt, the Realtek driver is indeed the one selected.

As for the ICH10 HD Audio controller, it is correctly enumerated on the PCI bus, but the driver does not detect it. On other issues, I have made no progress; the screen resolution is still stuck in 4:3 format, at a maximum of 1280x1024 (my memory had let me down a bit in the previous message).


If it might be of use to others, here’s how to interpret the double word configuration 0x03f80400 (network_config), reading from left to right:

0x03f8: this is the I/O address of the serial port
0x04: this is the IRQ of the serial port
0x00: this is a switch (0=disabled, 3=Ethernet); when setting up a network connection, the value should be set to 0x03, I guess; when the value is equal to or greater than 0xF0 (e.g. 0xF0 or 0xF3), this sets the “server assigned” configuration bit to 1; is this parameter linked to the activation of a DHCP client?

In the config.mnt file, this double word 0x03f80400 is expressed in standard big-endian notation. However, it is immediately preceded by the IP address parameters, which are encoded in little-endian. From one line to the next, it is therefore not immediately obvious that the notation convention changes.

[villemt]

Have you tried booting with 2) Auto-configuration, without any configuration changes ?

That should load the network driver, run the DHCP client and fetch the IP addresses.

btw, both Qemu and VirtualBox fetch IP addresses fine, when M64 is booted with "auto-configuration".
For VirtualBox you might need to set the netword card to i8254x.

Also, do you know the PCI ID for your Intel HDA audio card ?

[Golffies]

Hello,

In Windows, the ICH10 HD Audio controller is listed as follows on the PCI bus:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\enum\PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_3A3E&SUBSYS_A0021458&REV_00\BUS_00&DEV_1B&FUNC_00

It appears as entry 007 when viewed using Menuet’s pciscan utility (see screenshot). In addition, the JMicron IDE/PATA controller shows up at position 021, under the PCI identifier VEN_197B&DEV_2368. The motherboard has only one PATA connector, so only the first IDE channel can be used. The drive is configured as the Master device, using a jumper. The FAT32 volume is located on the first partition. However, the PATA drive is not recognised and the file system remains unreachable.

You’re right to emphasise the use of automatic detection mode at start-up. It wouldn’t be fair of me to give you this feedback if it hadn’t already been one of the very first options I’d tried right from the start. 🦯

Regards,

[villemt]

Interesting. I have a RTL 8111C card (8168:10ec) and it is recognized with auto-configuration and IPs are also fetched.

Does automated driver search in Setup-app fetch the RTL8169 driver ?

Does DHCP client return any values ?

[villemt]

After googling, I noticed that Intel P43 ICH10 might have power management problems with RTL 8111C, so disabling different power saving types in BIOS might also enable the card.