[MinnowBoard] MinnowBoard MAX 0.93 64-Bit & network lost

[Douglas Kryder]

hello all, i have been following this thread from start and would like to
test the firmware myself. i have some questions about flashing that i'm
hoping someone can answer. both my turbot boards currently have .090
firmware. in the past i have used a piece of hardware called SPI Hook by
tincantools and the software "flashrom" to flash my boards. i know the
flash utlity is available but i just enjoyed using the mentioned combo. up
to and including firmware 0.90 the file provided had extension .bin. since
0.90 all the compressed packages use file with extension .fd my questions
are 1. is the .fd file flashable with flashrom like .bin file are.?   2.
i've read i can open .fd file in hex editor and save as .bin and flash
that, is this possible to do without damage to board?   thanks for any
help. also if anyone has other suggestions on flashing the current file
from intel using flashrom i would like to hear.. thanks again. if it turns
out there is no path to using flashrom with the .fd files i plan to use
provided utility to flash and then join these tests. thank you.

On Fri, Sep 9, 2016 at 10:39 AM, David Scully <dscully at sbimagingsystems.com>
wrote:

> Michael,
>
> "Either happens only 1 out of every n (n possibly being variable as well)
> runs, or happens in a wildly variable time frame (takes as little as 2
> seconds and as long as 12 hours) to failure, regardless of environmental
> issues."
>
> That's consistent with what I'm seeing. Sometimes its near immediately,
> other times I have to run it for ~30 minutes.
>
> "But also note #1, enabling the PCIe port 1, could this contribute to PCIe
> disconnects in the custom hardware?"
>
> Even on 0.92 firmware, I enable this port because our board uses it for the
> main Ethernet NIC.
>
> ---
>
> I tested 0.92 firmware with Spread Spectrum On and was unable to lose PCIe
> connection on the i211 on Port 1 (Port 2 in the FW).
>
> I was hoping to test 0.93 firmware where spread spectrum is off but the
> option appears to have vanished. I'm wondering if there were more changes
> in
> that two month window to the PCIe system that might have motivated turning
> it on permanently in 0.93. There aren't many commits to bisect on the edk2
> minnowboard-max-udk2015 branch, but I have no idea how much the binary
> objects have changed.
>
> I might try to build a version that reverts this commit, so I'm able to
> disable spread spectrum on 0.93 firmware:
> https://github.com/tianocore/edk2-platforms/commit/
> 110b549d870c5851991b3479785a828b3287f2a6
>
> Our board leaves PCIe 0 disconnected while 1, 2, and 3 are connected to
> separate i211 NICs. I did discover today that it appears that on 0.93 I'm
> not seeing any PCIe disconnects on port 2 (Port 3 in FW). It looks like
> it's
> pointing to some potential signal integrity issues on our board that are
> exacerbated by the PCI change in the firmware.
>
> This might not be important, but one thing I noticed in the setup screen is
> that it doesn't show a IFWI Version or BIOS Version on my board, while it
> does appear on a Minnowboard Max. Our BOM_OP[X] pins (for HW ID) are
> strapped to mimic the Turbot X205.
>
>
>
> --
> View this message in context: http://minnowboard.57273.x6.
> nabble.com/MinnowBoard-MinnowBoard-MAX-0-93-64-Bit-
> network-lost-tp2387p2411.html
> Sent from the MinnowBoard mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
> _______________________________________________
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>
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