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sharky
Journeyman III

SB700 register documentation?

Hi,

 

sorry if this is not the appropriate forum. Feel free to redirect me elsewhere.

 

I'm a coreboot developer (free x86(-64) BIOS replacement) and the availability of public documentation on the SB600 and the RS690 has helped improve and maintain the 690/SB600 code in coreboot. We coreboot developers maintain a list of public AMD processor/chipset programming documentation here: http://www.coreboot.org/AMD_Public_Documents

 

Thanks for these docs!

 

Unfortunately, mainboards with 690/SB600 chipset are increasingly hard to get, so I'm investigating how much effort it would be to update the SB600 code in coreboot to support SB700/SB710/SB750.

 

Is there a release of the following docs planned (I don't know the exact names)? <edit>Creative googling turned up some document numbers</edit>

  • AMD SB700 RRG (Register Reference Guide) #43009
  • AMD SB700 RPR (Register Programming Requirements) #42413
  • AMD SB700 BDG (BIOS Developer's Guide) #43366

Same question applies to RX780/RD780 (#43291, #43451, #43734), but I don't want to overwhelm you with requests. 😉

 

There are quite a few coreboot developers (including me) standing by waiting for docs to immediately support popular desktop/server mainboards.

 

Thanks for any info on the topic.

 

Regards,

sharky

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23 Replies
avk
Adept III

I hope that those documents sooner or later will appear on AMD site, when somebody at AMD will wake up after the winter hibernation .

Hey AMD, wake up! It's been long time ago (one year!) when those chipsets were released and still there is no open information about them!

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I've sent a request to our tech docs teams.  There are several cases where AMD decides not to release older documents.  To be honest, I'm not exactly sure what those reasons are, but I'm working to get you an answer.  In the past we have requested older documents to be released to the public and we come to find out the old doucment references technology that was carried through to today's products and is still confidential.  I'm not sure if that is the case here, but I will hopefully find out soon.

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Thank you!

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Hi Sharky, I have good news.  The SB700 documentation has been ok'd to be prepared for public distribution for purposes of enabling the open-source community.  The bad news is I don't know how long it will take.  The SB engineering team needs to go through the NDA document and determine what stays and what goes.  If/when I get new info about these docs I'll post it here.

 

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Hi Stroia,

thank you for the quick followup and the great news!

If the SB engineering team wants to compare the to-be-reviewed SB700 docs with public SB600 docs to speed up their review (stuff which didn't change from SB600 probably won't need another review if it is already part of the public SB600 docs), here are the AMD publication numbers for the public SB600 docs: #42119, #46155, #46156, #46157. And here is the link to these docs: http://www.amd.com/us-en/ConnectivitySolutions/ProductInformation/0,,50_2330_15872,00.html

I'm very happy that the SB engineering team is going through the SB700 docs to prepare them for release. If possible, please pass on my "thank you" note to them.

 

Best regards,

sharky

P.S. This is why I recommend AMD. You take us developers seriously and strive to make us happy.

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Hi stroia,

did you get any information about when the SB700 docs will be released? Any status update would be appreciated.

 

Regards,

sharky

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Hi Sharky,

I asked for a status update on this last month and the people needed to review it were consumed with the SB800 review.  I put another status update request in today.  Hopefully we get better news this time.  I'll let you know what happens.

Thanks for your patience,

stroia

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Hurray!  There has been progress!  The work done by the engineering team is done.  It is now in the hands of the tech docs teams.  They have promised to give me an estimate by tomorrow of when they think it will go live.  There are a lot of documents ahead of it in their queue though... so I'm not sure what that could mean, time wise.  We'll have to see what they say tomorrow. 

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Yay! That's indeed great news. Many thanks to you and the engineering and tech docs teams!

The news about work being done on SB800 docs as well is unexpected, but definitely a nice suprise. It would be awesome to support that southbridge on the day of its release like we did with all AMD processors in the past.

(Side note: There is a lot of interest from embedded vendors (robotics etc.) for 780E support in coreboot. Some even have a few developers lined up to add 780E support to coreboot once the docs are open.)

 

Thanks for your efforts, stroia. They are very appreciated.

Regards,

sharky

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Hi Sharky,

The SB800 docs they were working on were likely NDA only and won't be publically launched until the product launches. 

I have a few questions/comments for you from the team:

1. Comment - the SB600 has a lot more longevity as long as you order it for the embedded version.  They extended it out until 2015. 

2. Comment - They have also posted a significant amount of documentation for Linux and coreboot developments at http://www.amd.com/us-en/ConnectivitySolutions/ProductInformation/0,,50_2330_15872,00.html.

3. Question - The embedded group has productized the SB710 as the Embedded Southbridge with longevity.  Will the SB710 work for you?  It will be easier on the team if we can focus on one version of the document to release.

Let me know on #3.

Thanks,

Stroia

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Hi Stroia,
let me reply to each part of your post.

1. Although SB600 may have an extended availability, it is almost impossible to buy non-embedded boards with it. Server and consumer boards with SB600 are being phased out by most mainboard vendors.

2. Yes, that's the link I posted earlier in this thread. Unfortunately, we coreboot developers are running out of still-available targets with 690/SB600.

3. SB710 would work for us since it seems to have a superset of SB700 features. However, the SB710 is still pretty hard to find, even in recent server-class boards. If the SB710 docs include the workarounds needed for SB700, we can use them now.
Since the RS780 docs seem to be pretty far away on the horizon, our plan was to work on 740G/SB700 so we could support boards which at least have a current southbridge. The 740G/SB700 combination would also serve as testing ground for SB700 family code until RS780 docs are open.

To summarize: SB710 is a good choice if we can use that doc for SB700 bringup as well.

Thanks,
sharky

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By the way, the Technical University of Graz (Austria) wants to use coreboot on RS780/SB700 for their numbercrunching needs related to their research on Brain Computer Interfaces (BCI), especially Direct Brain Interfaces (DBI).

The mathematical methods are mentioned here: http://hci.tugraz.at/schloegl/matlab/NaN/ and http://hci.tugraz.at/schloegl/matlab/tsa/

These methods are quite useful in various applications of biomedical signal processing (like electroencephalography), see http://biosig.sourceforge.net/ and http://hci.tugraz.at/schloegl/

 

I just wanted to mention this in case the doc team needs a good justification to work on SB700 family documentation (and hopefully RS780 after that 😉 ).

 

Regards,

Sharky

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Thanks Sharky, I will pass that information on to the team.  They promise to have something ready by next week, but I've been hearing that for a while now... It is more complicated than I imagined, but work is being done.  Thank you all for your patience.

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Hi Stroia,

did you already hear back from the doc team? There are a few upcoming trade shows where coreboot will have a booth and we repeatedly get the same question from visitors about support for newer AMD chipsets. A realistic time estimate (or some progress percentage) would help us a lot. I understand that the doc team is buried under a mountain of work (and knowing Murphy's law, I suspect there often is some other document which has to be bumped to the front of the queue urgently).

Thanks for your efforts, Stroia!

Regards,

Sharky

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Hi Sharky,

We were able to post the documents this morning   Here is a link http://developer.amd.com/documentation/guides/Pages/default.aspx.

Hopefully these meet your needs for the work you are looking to do.

Thanks,

Stroia

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Much apperciated! Domo arigato gozimasu., ;D

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Hi Stroia,

lots of coreboot developers are celebrating right now because of the announcement. Thank you so much! You rock!

I took a first look at the docs and they are pretty much exactly what we need. Reviewing roughly 600 pages of docs will take some time, but so far it looks great. The docs are also listed in the datasheet section of the coreboot wiki: http://www.coreboot.org/Datasheets#AMD_SB700.2FSB710.2FSB750

Please pass on our thanks to the doc team as well.

 

Regards,

Sharky

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Hi Stroia,

I have been poring over the new datasheets for hours and I have a few improvement/clarification suggestions. To whom should I send these suggestions? If that address is not intended to be public, a PM would be appreciated.

Regards,

Sharky

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And even more reasons to celebrate:

Thanks to the efforts of Stroia, the RS780 docs are now openly available as well at http://developer.amd.com/documentation/guides/Pages/default.aspx#chipset


This has a huge impact because coreboot will be able to support the majority of mainboards with AMD chipsets in the near future. Get ready for sub-second timing from poweron to bootloader and 3-second timing from poweron to Linux console. Of course, Windows boots faster as well.

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Hey guys,

it might be a bit OT but I heard that some AMD-Devs were/are working on some code for AMD 790X/SB750 or SB700/SB800 for coreboot but it stuck somewhere...

If that is true when might it get public available or even directly committed into coreboot?

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I would also Highly appreciate this documentation or the combination of the 780G Northbridge and 700 Southbridge. I am currently trying to develope a product I would mass market that will incorperate Coreboot as a means for a fast secure media center pc that is built completly on open source software. Releasing this information, on amd's behalf is a neccesity for me to be able to make any progress on this product. Doing so would not only be benifical to the amd developer/ hacker community but also to your main vendors and product suppliers. I feel that is is this community relationship that sets AMD above that of intel or nvidia, or  for that part all aspects of your trade. So, for the sake of the individual people that made AMD successfull, please make this a priority, i'm sure most of the work is already done.

Sincerely,

David Hamm

 ps. Pleeaasseeee release the info. or if not possible maybe we could get contact info with an employee to directly get just the info we need. However a writen document would be much more helpfull in the long run.

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tabu5
Journeyman III

Yes off course

You just wait and watch.

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Thanks for the links to the doc's I was in search for it.

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