20-August-2019

Compaq EVO N610c bugs

Introduction

Strictly speaking these are not really bugs, these are/were just some things bugging me. I managed to solve most of them, at least up to a level that I'm happy with. Here's the list:

1) Back-light control - Solved
    There is no back-light control in the linux kernel for this computer. No matter what kernel choices I chose nothing worked.

2) SPD memory - Solved
    RAM DIMMs have a small eeprom chip with details regarding how the memory controller is to be configured to work with the RAM. Usual internet knowledge just tells you to run the decode-dimms command. Nope, not working here buddy.

3) System EEPROM - Still a bugger
    On page 22 of the schematics there is an eight legged creature labelled "System EEPROM". What the frack are you and what are you doing there?

4) There is a debugger in my BIOS and I like catching bugs. How do I use it?? - Solved

5) To spin or not to spin, that is the question - Solved
    I was always puzzled by the threshold temperatures chosen by Compaq to spin the fan. Could I do something about it?

6) "Stupid square thingy" - Solved
    The lack of "proper" documentation for the graphics chip really bothered me. Could I find a way to control it myself?

7) "Stupid square thingy" slow and steady - Solved
    Another take on the stupid square, this time let's take it slow.

8) FreeDOS and a real PCI BIOS bug this time - Solved

(You'll need to read the Compaq N610c page first before continuing.)

Back-light control

Part 1)

So, what is the motivation? Believe it or not, the screen is just too bright to work at night in a very dimly lit room. I understand that a bright screen is useful when you're working in an office, by the window, in a sunny country, overlooking the beach (dream on...) so we cannot fault AUO for doing this. On the contrary, a big thanks to you AUO. 
(By the way, there are some great animations on their site.)

Indeed, I know that it is possible to just type:
$ xrandr --output LVDS --brightness 0.5
at the prompt to reduce the brightness to half, but this feels like cheating because all that this command is doing is making all the pixels darker, i.e. you have a bright light behind and get the liquid crystal to hide it. The cheat can also be seen in the mouse cursor, which remains bright.

So, I knew that removing the charger changes the "proper" brightness and what this means is that:
- The LM2601 adapter interface chip senses the power change and changes the ACPRES_3_IO signal


- That signal ends up in the Super-IO controller's pin 155, aka IN7
(The trick here is to know that connector CN1002 is the other side of connector CN501)


- The Super-IO is configured to react to changes on this pin and its interrupt routines then raise a SCI to the Pentium 4 and operating system


Now, a SCI is a System Control Interrupt and is described in the ACPI specifications this way (quoting from the specs):
"A system interrupt used by hardware to notify the OS of ACPI events."

So, what does the almighty internet have to say about all of this?
The theory goes that when such an interrupt is received, the kernel will look for the device that generated the interrupt, get the event number, look in the ACPI tables that the BIOS made available for the code and that has instructions regarding what to do and then execute them.

Could I then see all this process in action?
Well, I ended up going to the ACPICA downloads page, downloading the code and following the instructions to make the package and generate the utilities.
Then all that was left was running them in the right order

ACPI dump commands

The process above dumps the ACPI tables that the linux kernel is aware of to a file, then separates that file into the 4 component tables and disassembles them to four .dsl files with source code in the ASL language.
Bar variable names, these files are copies of the source code that compaq compiled, placed in the bios and which regulate the ACPI functionality of the laptop. So, we have a bit more than 200K of code to go through.

Blog posts like this and this are really good but, did I really need to learn a new programming language just to change the back-light? As this looked tedious and time consuming I tried another way, made a mental note to return to this subject later and carried on.

Part 2)

There is a small note in the LCD datasheet like this:


The inverter is the circuit needed by the system to generate the high voltages required by the CCFL (Cold Cathode Fluorescent Light) i.e. the back-light. The note implies that the brightness may be controlled by PWM.

PWM stands for Pulse Width Modulation. In the most common use, it refers to "square signal" waves or clocks where the time the signal is on may be different from the time it is off. There is usually a percentage value associated called duty cycle.

On page 18 of the schematic diagram we find the LCD connector and there is, indeed, a line there called INV_PWM_3


Since it goes to page 21 then it must connect to the Super-IO chip...



... and so it does, to pin 201 aka OUT9.
This pin can be configured to be the result of the PWM2 Function. (Datasheet typo bonus, can you spot it?)



The whole of Chapter 20 in the datasheet is dedicated to the programmable Pulse Width Modulators.
It's just 3 pages, mostly tables and the most relevant information is here.



Note that this is also a Mailbox indexed Register and that I had encountered these before, when I read the eeprom of the 8051.

So I made another one of my extremely stupid programs, a proof of concept that "just works".

#include <stdio.h>
#include <sys/io.h>
#include <sys/types.h>

#include <unistd.h>
#include <fcntl.h>

u_int8_t tmp[8];

int print_addr(u_int8_t log_device) {

  outb_p(0x07,0x2E);  outb_p(log_device,0x2F);

  outb_p(0x60,0x2E); tmp[3]=inb(0x2F); // Register 0x60
  outb_p(0x61,0x2E); tmp[4]=inb(0x2F); // Register 0x61

  printf("Log Dev %d address = %04X\n",log_device, (tmp[3] << 8) | tmp[4]);
 
  return (tmp[3] << 8) | tmp[4];
}

int main () {
 
  unsigned int x, y;
 
  ioperm(0x2E,8,1);
  ioperm(0x2F,8,1);
  ioperm(0x80,8,1);

  outb_p(0x55,0x2E);   // Enter configuration mode
 
  outb_p(0x26,0x2E);  tmp[1]=inb(0x2F);
  outb_p(0x27,0x2E);  tmp[2]=inb(0x2F); 
  printf("\nLPC Address %04X\n\n",(tmp[2] << 8) | tmp[1]);

  printf("Mailbox  ");x=print_addr(9);

  ioperm(x,16,1);
 
  printf("Changed to 90%\n"); y=0x80|(( 56 )<<1);;
  outb_p(0x95,x); outb_p(y,x+1);
  getchar();
  printf("Changed to 80%\n"); y=0x80|(( 50 )<<1);;
  outb_p(0x95,x); outb_p(y,x+1);
  getchar();
  printf("Changed to 70%\n"); y=0x80|(( 44 )<<1);;
  outb_p(0x95,x); outb_p(y,x+1);
  getchar();
  printf("Changed to 60%\n"); y=0x80|(( 37 )<<1);;
  outb_p(0x95,x); outb_p(y,x+1);
  getchar();
  printf("Changed to 50%\n"); y=0x80|(( 31 )<<1);;
  outb_p(0x95,x); outb_p(y,x+1);
  getchar();
  printf("Changed to 40%\n"); y=0x80|(( 25 )<<1);;
  outb_p(0x95,x); outb_p(y,x+1);
  getchar();
  printf("Changed to 30%\n"); y=0x80|(( 19 )<<1);;
  outb_p(0x95,x); outb_p(y,x+1);
  getchar();
  printf("Changed to 20%\n"); y=0x80|(( 13 )<<1);;
  outb_p(0x95,x); outb_p(y,x+1);
  getchar();
  printf("Changed to 10%\n"); y=0x80|((  6 )<<1);;
  outb_p(0x95,x); outb_p(y,x+1);
  getchar();
  printf("Changed to 00%\n"); y=0x80|((  0 )<<1);;
  outb_p(0x95,x); outb_p(y,x+1);
  getchar();

  printf("Back to 100%\n");
  outb_p(0x95,x); outb_p(0xfe,x+1);

  // Exit Configuration mode
  outb_p(0xAA,0x2E);

}

SPD Memory

In my quest to learn more about this laptop there came a time when I decided to know some more about the RAM memory. What RAM did I really have, what were the specs, etc, etc...
In all it's cleverness, all that the internet would tell me was to use the command 'decode-dimms' from the i2c-tools
package. Obviously, it did not work...



Then, the internet blurted... You're an idiot, you need to have the eeprom driver in your kernel.
And so I did, I compiled my kernel with this driver. But 'decode-dimms' was still not working.
The man page for 'decode-dimms' states it is a tool "to decode the information found in memory module SPD EEPROMs."

But, what is SPD? Aren't we talking about RAM?
SPD stands for Serial Presence Detect and is a small EEPROM chip that exits in all memory modules since the mid nineties. Wikipedia has a very nice article about it and for me the two key sentences were these:

"The SPD EEPROM is accessed using SMBus, a variant of the I²C protocol. This reduces the number of communication pins on the module to just two: a clock signal and a data signal."


Looking at the schematic we can see the signals in the Dual Inline Memory Module connector pins 195 and 193:



Which leads us to page 19 and to the corresponding pins in the ICH3-M.


Sub-chapter 5.17 and chapter 12 describe this device in detail. Quite helpful also, for reference, is the applicable SMBus standard.

So now I knew I also had to include some more stuff in the kernel

This option needed to be selected...


...along with this one


Another reboot later... Did it work?



Nope. The manual says I should see a 00:1f.3 device but it's just not there



What was I doing wrong? Would I ever figure it out???
Something must be wrong with the driver, right? Actually with the whole PCI enumeration stuff.
So I checked the linux kernel documentation. There's a file called 'i2c-i801' in the Documentation/i2c/busses/ folder which states this...

Hidden ICH SMBus
----------------

If your system has an Intel ICH south bridge, but you do NOT see the
SMBus device at 00:1f.3 in lspci, and you can't figure out any way in the
BIOS to enable it, it means it has been hidden by the BIOS code. Asus is
well known for first doing this on their P4B motherboard, and many other
boards after that. Some vendor machines are affected as well.

The first thing to try is the "i2c_ec" ACPI driver. It could be that the
SMBus was hidden on purpose because it'll be driven by ACPI. If the
i2c_ec driver works for you, just forget about the i2c-i801 driver and
don't try to unhide the ICH SMBus. Even if i2c_ec doesn't work, you
better make sure that the SMBus isn't used by the ACPI code. Try loading
the "fan" and "thermal" drivers, and check in /proc/acpi/fan and
/proc/acpi/thermal_zone. If you find anything there, it's likely that
the ACPI is accessing the SMBus and it's safer not to unhide it. Only
once you are certain that ACPI isn't using the SMBus, you can attempt
to unhide it.

In order to unhide the SMBus, we need to change the value of a PCI
register before the kernel enumerates the PCI devices. This is done in
drivers/pci/quirks.c, where all affected boards must be listed (see
function asus_hides_smbus_hostbridge.) If the SMBus device is missing,
and you think there's something interesting on the SMBus (e.g. a
hardware monitoring chip), you need to add your board to the list.

I looked at this and thought, wow, this is scary. I don't want to unhide the controller and destroy the computer due to over heating.

I decided to drown my frustrations on something else, maybe some inspiration would come...

I picked up the schematic diagram again and played a game of spot the bus. SMBus is just a special case of the I²C and I found many of these in the motherboard.
The Super-IO has two I²C controllers, each controlling a pair of buses by means of multiplexing. The datasheet calls them ACCESS.Bus. I have no idea why... Here is the specification if you're interested.

Following the bus lines on the schematic diagram we see that these devices connect to the Super-IO chip:
- A system EEPROM (page 22)
- A thermal sensor for the CPU (page 39)
- The main battery (page 40)
- The extra battery, that can be installed in the cd-rom, floppy bay (page 40)
- The docking station connector (page 35)
- The mini-pci connector (page 36)

These devices connect to ICH3-M:
- The SO-DIMM memory connectors
- The ICS950805 Frequency Generator chip

The M7 ATI Radeon chip has independent I²C buses for
- LCD, VGA and DVI connectors
In this case the I²C bus is "renamed" DDC.

So, actually, the ICH3-M's SMBus only talks to the memories and to the Frequency generator chip. Reading the manual of this chip my understanding was that it is only programmed by ACPI when the computer needs to suspend or hibernate.

Back to the ICH3-M datasheet I found this register




I felt like I was finally getting somewhere. Let's see...



0x8749 = 1000 0111 0100 1001

So, bit3 is 1, the device is disabled and bit0 is 1, meaning that the IO space was left enabled.

Time to write another one of my programs...
The program clears bit 3 and then reads the PCI configuration space of the SMBus device which should now be visible.

#include <stdio.h>
#include <sys/io.h>
#include <sys/types.h>

u_int8_t pciConfigReadByte (u_int8_t bus, u_int8_t slot,
                             u_int8_t func, u_int8_t offset)
 {
    u_int32_t address;
    u_int32_t lbus  = (u_int32_t)bus;
    u_int32_t lslot = (u_int32_t)slot;
    u_int32_t lfunc = (u_int32_t)func;
    u_int16_t tmp = 0;
 
    address = (u_int32_t)((lbus << 16) | (lslot << 11) |
              (lfunc << 8) | (offset & 0xfc) | ((u_int32_t)0x80000000));
    outl (address, 0xCF8);
    tmp = (u_int8_t)((inl (0xCFC) >> ((offset & 3) * 8)) & 0xff);
    return (tmp);
 }

u_int16_t pciConfigReadWord (u_int8_t bus, u_int8_t slot,
                             u_int8_t func, u_int8_t offset)
 {
    u_int32_t address;
    u_int32_t lbus  = (u_int32_t)bus;
    u_int32_t lslot = (u_int32_t)slot;
    u_int32_t lfunc = (u_int32_t)func;
    u_int16_t tmp = 0;
 
    address = (u_int32_t)((lbus << 16) | (lslot << 11) |
              (lfunc << 8) | (offset & 0xfc) | ((u_int32_t)0x80000000));
    outl (address, 0xCF8);
    tmp = (u_int16_t)((inl (0xCFC) >> ((offset & 2) * 8)) & 0xffff);
    return (tmp);
 }

int main () {

  int i,j;
  u_int8_t bus, dev, func, reg;
  u_int32_t address;
  u_int32_t tmp;

  ioperm(0xCF8,32,1);
  ioperm(0xCFC,32,1);

  bus =  0;  dev =  0x1F;  func=  0;  reg =  0xF2;

  address = (u_int32_t)((bus << 16) | (dev << 11) |
            (func << 8) | (reg & 0xfc) | ((u_int32_t)0x80000000));
  outl (address, 0xCF8);
  tmp = inl (0xCFC);

  printf("\n   %08X\n\n",tmp);

  tmp = tmp & 0xFFF7FFFF; // This will clear bit 3

  printf("\n   %08X\n\n",tmp);

  outl(tmp,0xCFC);

  bus =  0;  dev =  0x1F;  func=  3;  reg =  0;

  printf("\nBus:%02X Device:%02X Function:%02X\n\n", bus, dev, func );

  for (i=0;i<16;i++) {
    printf("%02X: ",i*16);
    for(j=0;j<16;j++) {
      printf("%02X ",pciConfigReadByte(bus, dev, func, reg++));
    }
    printf("\n");
  }
}

This is it, it worked

YEHEY!!!

I have highlighted bytes 0x20 and 0x21 because they define the IO Space base address of the device.
So, it's at IO port 0x1200.

$ cat /proc/ioports shows it there


But is this even used by ACPI at all? Building on the knowledge acquired in the previous bug I looked for 1200 in the dsdt.dsl file that I had extracted before.

And yes, it is here, ACPI tells the linux kernel to reserve it as a motherboard resource and not to use this address space for anything else.



There is also the definition of an OperationRegion with variable names, sizes and a method that uses them.


So, ACPI uses the device but, as we have seen, physically, only the memories and the frequency generator are connected to it. The SPD data is only needed once at boot up by the BIOS routines that initialize the laptop. Changing whether certain clocks are active is only done at power state changes.

The next step is dangerous (AND IT WILL VOID YOU WARRANTY, LOL) in the sense that it may not be possible to securely suspend the laptop afterwards but I considered the risk low enough to try this.



You will notice that the kernel changed the port number to 0x1080 and assigned a driver to the device.

And 'decode-dimms' works now.




Just out of curiosity here are some BIOS routines...

The SMBus routine.


And the beginning of the MCH-M memory configuration routine



System EEPROM

Here it is, in page 22.



It is a NM24c02. I have found the respective datasheet.
This is a very common chip, in fact it is also the same that was used by Kingston to hold the SPD data on the RAM DIMM.
All I know is that it connects to the Super-IO. I want to read the data in there, but haven't been able to find any information about this on the internet. There is this great blog post, particularly this part that seems relevant, but not much more.
The EC has one additional function. The ACPI spec allows for an i2c bus to be implemented through the EC, with EC registers mapping to i2c registers. The observant among you will realise that this means that there's an indexed access protocol being implemented on top of indexed access hardware, which is more layers of indirection than seem sane. For additional humour, this is usually only used to add support for ACPI smart batteries. ACPI batteries are generally abstracted behind a set of ACPI methods that provide information. Smart batteries instead speak i2c directly to the OS[2] for no real benefit. Linux handles these devices fine, and while the chances are you probably don't have one, the chances are also that if you do you haven't noticed.
My plan is to tackle this "bug" next when I manage to find some free time.

Debugger in the BIOS

This is the result of running the strings command in the BIOS kept at the low memory area addresses 0x000E0000 and forward.

lfs [ ~/Compaq Evo N610c ]$ strings -tx fwh-000E0000-000FFFFF.bin | head -40
    960 G  b,#
    97c I  x8t
    983 IB x8t
    9de PCDB:
    9e5 MD %<
    a01 MM }?
    a0f MK ?A
    a55 BE $2I
    a5c BD     2I
    aac ^ Error
    ab5                                                                                                               G [<offset>]
    b30   Starts execution at the current CS:EIP. Breaks at optional <offset>.
    b77 G =<start> [<end>]
    b8a   Starts execution at <start> offset. Breaks at optional <offset>.
    bd1   Clears all breakpoints and starts execution at current CS:EIP.
    c13 T [<count>] [NOREGS]
    c28   Executes one instruction at current CS:EIP or executes <count> instructions.
    c77   Specifying NOREGS will turn off register dump for each instruction.
    cbd   SPecifying * for <count> will trace until a breakpoint is triggered.
    d04 TI [<count>] [NOREGS]
    d1a   Same as T but steps into INT calls.
    d40 P [<count>] [NOREGS]
    d55   Same as T but steps over CALL, LOOP and REP instructions.
    d92 U [<addr>] [<end>]
    da5   Disassemble code. If no selector, CS is assumed. Breaks at optional <end>
    df1   offset. Substituting a "$" for <addr> will start from current CS:EIP.
    e39 U [<addr>] [l<count>]
    e4f   Disassemble <count> lines (hex).
    e74 R [<reg> [<val>]]
    e86   Display/modify CPU registers. If <val> specified, it is written to <reg>.
    ed2 DR [<reg> [<val>]]
    ee5   Display/modify CPU debug registers.
    f0b SR [<reg> [<val>]]
    f1e   Display/modify CPU registers saved in SMI RAM.
    f52   Display CPU control registers.
    f74 I<size> <port>
    f83 O<size> <port> <val>
    f98   Input/output data, where <size> is B (8-bits), W (16-bits), or D (32-bits).
    fe6   Output to port, where <size> is B (8-bits), W (16-bits), or D (32-bits).
   1032 PI<size> <bus> <device> <func> <index>

It seems pretty obvious that there is a debugger / disassembler in the BIOS.
The question is: how can this be activated? How can I run it?

This was my hardest hack as it was the one that took the longest. But it was very interesting nonetheless.
It led me to this document. It contains a very nice reference of the PC architecture BIOS calls/interrupts.

Another cool document is this one, which is a PC-DOS / MS-DOS 3.30 technical reference, with a good introduction and
a description of all the interrupts and function calls. There is also a good description of the DEBUG command.

So, I was going around in radare2 trying to find any reference from the "normal" BIOS at addresses 0xF0000- 0xFFFFF
onto addresses in the 0xE0000-0xEFFFF range but couldn't find any... Then I looked at the disassembled code and tried
to find any piece of code that was relatively large and did not end up with POPs and RET. Also unsuccessful. Then I
thought about randomly jumping into code in that region and see what happened. This is why I started investing time in
understanding the DOS DEBUG command. Then by mere chance I was scrolling up and down and saw this...



So... Lots of ffff followed by lots of 0000 with some stuff in between.
A number of EAs in there, between the other numbers...
I had encountered EAs in disassembly before, so I knew these were long jumps.



It was time to boot into DOS and try them out.



This will start the DEBUG command, assemble a jump instruction in that memory location and then run it
(command g stands for go.)

Some of these locations would crash the computer, while others would just restart it and I felt like I was back to
square one.
I noticed, however, that when jumping to E000:8005, like shown above and just before the reset, the cursor would
change shape from an underline to a block. The blocky cursor would then also be present at the top of the BIOS boot
splash screen which did not happen before. After rebooting the computer N times and losing hope I simply pressed
the ENTER key at the splash screen with the blocky cursor and.... surprise surprise...



... I was presented with a prompt to the monitor/disassembler/debugger program in the BIOS.
This is more advanced and has more commands (including help screens) than the DOS DEBUG command but works in
a similar way. It allows you to disassemble, dump, look into register values, do ins, outs, even look into and change
values in the PCI configuration space. You can also define breakpoints.

If you are an operating system developer and/or if you want to hack boot sectors and/or earlier initialisation boot
code this is very useful.

   Update 7-Oct-2019

So, I made a boot sector like this...



... and added an entry in grub.cfg

menuentry "Compaq BIOS debugger" {
    set root=(hd0,1)
    chainloader /boot/debug-c.bin
}
 
Now, every time I restart the laptop I have the option of starting the debugger.

To spin or not to spin that is the question


As I mentioned in the other page about the computer, "Pentium4s ... get hot and spin the fans too often."
This is definitely true and I tried to understand the logic behind this and investigate why this is so.
So, I looked in the linux kernel sources and, buried there, there is a small program called tmon, in the tools/thermal/tmon/ folder. Compilation went smoothly and this is what I saw when I ran it.



I'll let the README explain what the program is and what it does.

Increasingly, Linux is running on thermally constrained devices. The simple
thermal relationship between processor and fan has become past for modern
computers.

As hardware vendors cope with the thermal constraints on their products, more
and more sensors are added, new cooling capabilities are introduced. The
complexity of the thermal relationship can grow exponentially among cooling
devices, zones, sensors, and trip points. They can also change dynamically.

To expose such relationship to the userspace, Linux generic thermal layer
introduced sysfs entry at /sys/class/thermal with a matrix of symbolic
links, trip point bindings, and device instances. To traverse such
matrix by hand is not a trivial task. Testing is also difficult in that
thermal conditions are often exception cases that hard to reach in
normal operations.

TMON is conceived as a tool to help visualize, tune, and test the
complex thermal subsystem.

What it does not explain is that the structures and values that the kernel keeps in /sys/class/thermal end up
there as a result of the processing of the ACPI tables.

So, what we see is that there are 2 thermal zones (i.e. temperature sensors) and their relationship with the
different "fans". We see also the current temperature reported by each sensor (bars near the bottom) and the
temperatures that trigger the fans, i.e. the trip point bindings.
There aren't really 3 fans, what we have is a fan that can rotate at 3 different speeds.

The letters A, P and C stand for Active cooling (fan,) Passive cooling (processor clock slow down) and Critical.
If you reach a critical temperature the system should shutdown to protect itself.

tmon has another function, it allows you to manually switch the fans on and off so manually select the speed as well.
What it does not let you do is change the thresholds.

So, we can see that, if the temperature is more that 50oC, then the fan will start at the lower speed, when it reaches
60oC it increases the speed and then at 84oC we get the higher speed.
On the way down, it will lower the speeds at 70oC, 55oC and will switch it off at 40oC.

I did a number of experiments, switching the fans on and off and realised that, completely idle, the processor
will naturally be at around 45oC or thereabouts. Left alone, the system will naturally spin the fan at the lower speed
almost constantly, it will hardly ever reach 39oC.

Some of the earlier manuals of the laptop don't even mention the 2GHz Pentium4 and it occurred to me that maybe
Compaq did not change anything in the ACPI tables to account for the different processors that ended up being
shipped with it.

So, as you can see in the backlight bug, I had already extracted and decompiled the ACPI tables and could look into the
source code. I could still not fully understand it due to lack of time and willpower to learn the language.
But that did not stop me looking on the internet for ways to change the ACPI tables.

One of the first links that I clicked led me to this forum thread. Lots of interesting and sad stories about people with really
buggy DSDT ACPI tables (DSDT is the table where the code is kept.)



Two things caught my eye here. The first was the mention of a _CRT value and the other that the temperature is in
Kelvin * 10.

I looked for _CRT in my DSDT



Sure enough, here it was.

0x0E58 is 3672 in decimal,
To convert from Kelvin to Celsius I subtracted by 2732 and divided that by 10 which resulted in 94oC.
This was encouraging because this was the temperature I could see in tmon.

Would it work the other way around? What value could I expect for 40oC, 55oC, etc...
As an example 40 *10 + 2732 =  3132 = 0x0C3C

Cool, it seems like all the temperatures I was looking for were there, from line 5564 to line 5579



Time to change them.



All that was left was to recompile the table with iasl and test it.

The kernel file /Documentation/acpi/dsdt-override.txt tells you how to do it.
(It directs you to this helpful article from intel.)

$ generate/unix/bin/iasl -tc -cr -vr dsdt.dsl

I then needed to edit the resulting DSDT.hex file and change the name of the table to AmlCode

$ cp dsdt.hex /sources/linux-4.9.135/include/DSDT.hex

I ensured that...

CONFIG_STANDALONE=n
CONFIG_ACPI_CUSTOM_DSDT=y
CONFIG_ACPI_CUSTOM_DSDT_FILE="DSDT.hex"

... compiled a new kernel and it worked!!!

It worked!! 

I had changed the thresholds successfully and the fan now spins only sporadically.


The "Stupid Square Thingy"

13-Apr-2020
 
I'll start this one by showing the "solution" out right. Here it is, in all it's glory... A white square in the screen.
"WOW, how did you do it?" you may ask in annoyed disbelief, thinking to yourself internally "Why?!? WTF, FFS..."




So let me show you the code, maybe it will be a bit clearer then

#include <fcntl.h>
#include <errno.h>
#include <sys/mman.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include "radeon_reg.h"
#define UV (unsigned long * volatile)

int main () {
  int fd;
  unsigned char * volatile r;
  long temp;

  fd=open("/sys/bus/pci/devices/0000:01:00.0/resource2",O_RDWR|O_CLOEXEC);
  if(fd==-1) return errno;
  r=mmap(NULL,64*1024,PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE,MAP_SHARED,fd,0);
  if(r==MAP_FAILED) {r=NULL;close(fd);return errno;}
  temp=*UV(r+RADEON_DP_GUI_MASTER_CNTL);
  *UV(r+RADEON_DP_GUI_MASTER_CNTL)=RADEON_GMC_DST_PITCH_OFFSET_CNTL|
    RADEON_GMC_BRUSH_SOLID_COLOR|(6<<8)|RADEON_GMC_SRC_DATATYPE_COLOR|
    RADEON_ROP3_ONE|RADEON_GMC_CLR_CMP_CNTL_DIS;
  *UV(r+RADEON_DST_X_Y)=(200 << 16) | 200;
  *UV(r+RADEON_DST_WIDTH_HEIGHT)= (150 << 16) | 150;
  *UV(r+RADEON_DP_GUI_MASTER_CNTL)=temp;
}

(To compile the program you'll also need this, the radeon_reg.h file)

Still not clear?

I have no #includes for GTK, QT, wxWidgets, SDL, not even xcb or xlib? What am I doing there?

So, it got stubbornly stuck into my mind that I had to be capable of using the 2D accelaration functionality of the Radeon and that I could not stop until I did it. This had to be done directly on the card. That square is the result of that.

But what is a video card anyway? There are some things that are common to all of them:

Graphics cards are inside the computers but are different animals altogether. They are pets of the main processor and have to follow its orders. It is the pentium4 that tells the card what to display on the screen. The card also has to have a way to be told what to do.

Part 1)

So I had to do research.

This was a quite a roller coaster... To get there I had to do a lot of "internet". I started with the R128 manual. As I said in the cracking the N610 page, this manual "goes into a lot of detail, describing the architecture of the ATI cards."
And this is true, up to a point. You get a good idea of how that card works but just a very general idea of how the other ATI cards do. I have a R100, M7, an ATI 7500, based on another chip. The examples in that just do not work.

The R128 manual tells us to read the  "Programmer's Guide to the EGA, VGA, and Super VGA Cards" by Richard Ferraro to understand more about the VGA Controller mode. At first I could not find it anywhere on the internet  but then I found it here. At first I gave up as it wouldn't download but one day I was patient enough to wait for the page to load and then was happily surprised. This is a pdf file which is a brilliant scan of the original paper book. The OCR is amazing, all the pages are there. You have the original jpegs of each page and overlaid on it you have the text that you can copy and search. At 1612 pages we end up with a 485Mb file. So this is the second reason I'm not hosting this file. The first is that the book is still being sold online, even though it came out in 1994. And I can also understand why, it is a brilliant book, it tells you the history of graphics on the PC from the MDA, CGA, Hercules, EGA, VGA and the absolute explosion of the Super VGA cards. Along the way it explains all there is to know about frame buffers, colour palettes, resolutions, coordinates, text, graphics, fonts, drawing lines, solids, "blits", registers, etc, etc. Everyone trying to understand graphics cards needs to read this book. It's that strong. You also end up understanding what 2D acceleration is.

So, why is there no documentation for the M7 chip inside my Compaq? The Ferraro book tells us about 13 different companies competing in the graphics card market in 1993/1994: IBM, ATI, C&T, Cirrus Logic, Video7, IIT, NCR, OAK, S3, Trident, Tseng Labs, Paradise and Weitek. (Ndivia is still absent, interestingly). These companies were all fighting to be the best and a climate of secrecy ruled. In the pre win95 days companies would associate themselves with software developement houses which could then develop the sw that made use of the best features of the cards. Non Disclosure Agreements had to be signed in order to have access to documentation, all to prevent the competition from stealing their best ideas. Alternatively, the companies would provide software developer kits with defined Application Programmer's Interfaces that allowed programming the cards. Importantly, the cards also strived to implement in hardware as much of the MS windows 3 functionality as possible. Developing drivers for windows was the exclusive responsibility of the card manufacturer. The other huge market was DOS games.

This was a problem for linux with its GPL rules when it became more prominent in the early 2000.
The development of the linux drivers for the ATI cards was at first ignored by ATI, but then, later, ATI/AMD engineers actively participated in the drivers' development.
Nowadays we see that none of those companies survived. ATI was bought by AMD in 2006. Intel collaborated with Tugsten Graphics, the company behind the development of much of the linux 3D code. Nvidia came from behind and is obviously still around.

From 2007/2008 AMD and Intel decided to release practically all of the documentation concerning their cards. Unfortunately, I guess due to legalities, the information for the older cards like mine is not publicly available.
(Don't quote me on any of this, it's all very sketchy and hush hush on the internet...)

So, where could I find more??? Well, the whole linux graphics stack software was at my disposal so I started trying to understand it.

I had to read:
- This very good overview
      http://moi.vonos.net/linux/graphics-stack/
- This document from the author of the nouveau driver
      linuxgraphicsdrivers.pdf
- The Wikipedia articles starting from here
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Rendering_Manager
- Stuff from X.ORG itself, of course
      https://www.x.org/wiki/Development/Documentation/HowVideoCardsWork/
- More stuff from freedesktop.org
      A bit of history https://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/DriHistory/
      https://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/RadeonArchitecture/     

I also came across a little program called Radeontool which REALLY helped a lot.

Part 2)

The Mobility Radeon is a PCI device, therefore it has a PCI configuration space that can be queried.



The linux kernel enumerator, when the kernel starts, finds it in bus 1, device 0, function 0.
In the hex dump we can see the device vendor 1002 and the device id 4c57.
The device is being controlled by the kernel device driver called "radeon".
The rest of the fields were decoded by the lspci utility and are shown above. Of most interest are the three "Regions".
The pci configuration space has "told" the kernel that it needed a region of I/O space of 256 bytes, a "memory" region of 64Kbytes and another of 128Mbytes. The kernel has then assigned the addresses of 3000h, A0000000h and 80000000h respectively. 

The differences between "I/O" and "memory" address spaces are documented in chapter 12 of volume 1 of the Intel manual. If you don't understand what they are yet, reading this is required.

The linux kernel provides these spaces as abstractions in the filesystem and this means that I can "open" then as files.



So now you understand the 1st line of the program with the open statement. I can access that physical space using file related functions, like read, write, seek... But there is another, better way...

To understand the 2nd line, one has to read chapters 1, 2 and 3 of volume 3 of the Intel manual. (A lot of pages, all worth it.)
This picture will help a bit.



It can be summarised as follows. Any program running on a x86 processor in protected mode, (which is the one used by linux,) when addressing memory using any of the mov instructions, will do so using a value which is a pointer to the addressed byte. That pointer has 2 parts, a segment selector and an offset. The segment selector points to a table and is used as an index into it. That table contains values for each possible index. That value is then added to the offset to create a new pointer. That pointer is what the application knows and uses in it's "personal" "linear" address space.
But, in linux, paging is also used, so the value calculated before is not used to address physical memory but instead is used as another pointer into the paging tables. These tables are an extra layer of indirection, they are maintained by the operating system and, at last, we have the physical address.
The physical address is actually what the Pentium4 outputs in  its address lines in the front side bus to the MCH-M northbridge.

So, this is what the mmap function does. In this case, it is a mechanism that returns to the application, a pointer to a physical memory area, by means of creating the necessary entries in the paging tables.

I got there by analysing the source code of Radeontool and libpciaccess, which it uses.



In this example the values b7712000 and af552000 were returned to the application. Writing to these addresses directs the writes to the resource2 and resource0 areas and ultimately to the graphics card.

What are these areas? These are explained well in the Radeon Architecture article that I link to above.
Let me quote from that:
"
It is important to note that EVERYTHING you are doing to radeon card ultimately boils down to a series of register writes. The X server basically takes the high level functions and translates them into a series of register writes. Mesa takes the OpenGL commands and (working with DRI) translates them into a series of register writes.
"

Resource2 are all the registers that control the card, their names and functions are described in the M6 Registers document. I don't have the corresponding M7 document, but the radeon cards evolved keeping always a big level of register compatibility and all the required registers are actually also in the kernel and Xorg drivers: you'll find radeon_reg.h linked above. All registers have names and some registers can be accessed by more than one way.
Here are a couple of examples:



So, the document tells us that the DEVICE_ID register exists both in the pci configuration space and in the Memory Mapped Register space. We had already seen the value 4c57 in the lspci printout and I managed to verify it with the radeontool.



Let's see another example. In this one I query a register which exists in both the MM and IO areas.






So now all the other statements in my program can be understood.
All that I do is read and write from and to the registers. 

But how did I know which registers to write to, to draw the square?
The clue is in the HowVideoCardsWork link above.



In the source code of the Xorg driver (xf86-video-ati-7.7.0) there is a file called radeon_exa_funcs.c and there we see the
RADEONPrepareSolid and RADEONSolid functions. I studied the code and took only the minimum required:
Change RADEON_DP_GUI_MASTER_CNTL, then RADEON_DST_X_Y and then RADEON_DST_WIDTH_HEIGHT. In the end I put back the value of the RADEON_DP_GUI_MASTER_CNTL register. It runs so quickly that I do not disturb the status of the X server driver in any way, except, of course, now I have a white square thingy on the screen. This is pretty harmless, it goes away anytime the window is updated.

But, is this enough to fully  understand the card? NO!! Lots of questions remain:

- How do you change the card from VGA compatibility mode to Accelerator mode?
- How does the card work with Colours? And Text Fonts? And Icons? And the mouse pointer?
- What is this Composite Mode that allows some windows to be transparent?
- How does the Memory Mapping AGP GART device works? How does the card use PCI Bus mastering?
- What is the Command Processor and how does it work?
- What are the 3D capabilities of the card? How do you use them?
- What's up with programs that play video? What do they do differently?
- How about multi monitor setups, i2c / EDID? Resolutions? Horizontal / vertical synch?


The "Stupid Square Thingy" - slow and steady


2020-06-10

This time I did things differently. I did not look at any code from the linux radeon drivers.
So, I already knew that the registers are PCI resource2 and that the video card memory is mapped in resource0.
But, how could I write to it so that I could draw a square on the screen?

I started with my friend crappy here...

// Crappy  Stupid Square Thingy
#include <stdio.h>
#include <fcntl.h>
#include <errno.h>
#include <sys/mman.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include "radeon_reg.h"
#define UV (unsigned long * volatile)

int main () {
  int fd;
  unsigned int i;
  unsigned char * volatile r;
  long temp;

  fd=open("/sys/bus/pci/devices/0000:01:00.0/resource0",O_RDWR|O_CLOEXEC);
  if(fd==-1) { perror("1"); return errno; }

  r=mmap(NULL,64*1024*1024,PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE,MAP_SHARED,fd,0);
  if(r==MAP_FAILED) { r=NULL; close(fd); perror("2"); return errno; }

  for(i=1*1024*1024+32*1024+64;i<5*1024*1024;i+=4) *UV(r+i) = 0xffffffff;
}


So, I just poked values using a for loop, changing the initial and final values until I found the area of video memory
from where the M7 is getting what is being displayed on the screen.
In this case, we can see that it starts 1M and 32Kbytes into the memory. (The +64 is just for show.)
This is 0x00108000 in hexadecimal.

That's all well and neat and all that but, I wasn't really happy with this.
I dug into the radeon_reg.h file, into the register description pdf and into and into the Rage 128 Developer's guide
until I found the CRTC_OFFSET  register. Then the radeontool confirmed the value. Bingo!

root [ ~ ]# /sources/radeontool/radeontool regmatch CRTC_OFFSET
CRTC_OFFSET (0224)    0x00108000 (1081344)

Time to use my newly acquired knowledge and waste my time writing another useless program.

//   Stupid Square Thingy 2
#include <stdio.h>
#include <fcntl.h>
#include <errno.h>
#include <sys/mman.h>
#include <sys/stat.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include "radeon_reg.h"
#define UV (unsigned long * volatile)

int main () {
  int fd0, fd1;
  struct stat s;
  unsigned char * volatile m;
  unsigned char * volatile r;
  long co; // crtc_offset
  int x1,y1,x2,y2,x,y,b;
  int bypp; //bytes per pixel
  int ppl; //pixels per line

  fd0=open("/sys/bus/pci/devices/0000:01:00.0/resource0",O_RDWR|O_CLOEXEC);
  if(fd0==-1) { perror("resource0 open"); return errno;}
  if (fstat(fd0, &s) == -1) { close(fd0); perror("fstat0"); return errno; }

  m=mmap(NULL,s.st_size,PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE,MAP_SHARED,fd0,0);
  if(m==MAP_FAILED) { close(fd0); perror("resource0 mmap"); return errno; }

  fd1=open("/sys/bus/pci/devices/0000:01:00.0/resource2",O_RDWR|O_CLOEXEC);
  if(fd1==-1) { perror("resource0 open"); return errno;}
  if (fstat(fd1, &s) == -1) { close(fd1); perror("fstat2"); return errno; }

  r=mmap(NULL,s.st_size,PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE,MAP_SHARED,fd1,0);
  if(r==MAP_FAILED) { close(fd1); perror("resource2 mmap"); return errno; }

  co=*UV(r+RADEON_CRTC_OFFSET); //screen location in video memory

  bypp=(*UV(r+RADEON_CRTC_GEN_CNTL) & RADEON_CRTC2_PIX_WIDTH_MASK ) >> 8;

  switch (bypp) { //from the M6 register manual, page 218
    case 2: bypp=1; break;
    case 3: bypp=2; break;
    case 4: bypp=2; break;
    case 5: bypp=3; break;
    case 6: bypp=4; break; // This is still a 24bit per pixel mode
                           // with 256 shades of red, blue or green.
                           // The 4th byte is ignored and wasted.
                           // However this mode is the fastest
                           // because in the x86 32 bits architecture
                           // memory acesses are always 4 bytes wide
    case 7: bypp=2; break;
    case 8: bypp=2; break;
    default: 4;
  }
 
  ppl=(*UV(r+RADEON_CRTC_PITCH)& 0X3ff)*8;
    //see Ferraro's book to understand pitch

  x1=200; y1=200; x2=350; y2=350; //where's my square at?

  for (y=y1;y<y2;y++) {
    for(x=x1;x<x2;x++) {
      if (bypp==4)
        *UV(m+co+y*ppl*bypp+x*bypp)=0x00FFFFFF;
      else
        for(b=0;b<bypp;b++) {
          *UV(m+co+y*ppl*bypp+x*bypp+b)=0xFF;
        }
    }
  }
}

And here are the results

slow square

This extremely unscientific method shows that the second way of drawing the square takes twice as long.

FreeDOS and the PCI BIOS bug


2021-08-08

I wrote back here that "In a way, this laptop is the perfect study object, as it comes from a time that married the old ISA (and Plug&Play) computers with the more modern ACPI / PCI ones of today" but, to be honest I was not really sure how a computer designed with Windows XP in mind would behave with older software. I had already toyed with MS-DOS 3.2 so I went looking for something else.
So, what about Freedos?  I had heard of FreeDOS but never really attempted to discover more. Who needs DOS when you already have a free Linux distribution running on your computer? However, upon reading that "...all FreeDOS programs are distributed under the GNU General Public License or a similar Open source software license" it really piqued my interest.

So, how do you install Freedos? The typical way is to use a virtual machine and this is exactly how I started. I created a virtual hard drive image and used the stable cd-rom image which I had downloaded from the FreeDOS website.

Qemu running FreeDOS 1.2 installer

This went smoothly but very slowly. The installation gives you the option to install source code, which is great.

After reboot you are left with the famous C:\> prompt and a display of the memory map. The boot process also presents you a list of 4 different memory managers and configurations to choose from. And you start exploring from there. The wiki is also great and you soon learn about the package manager FDIMPLES (in FD1.2 install it first with fdinst install d:\utils\fdimples.zip) and the FDNPKG package updater that downloads and install new versions of programs from the internet.
This was a surprise for me. I wasn't expecting FreeDOS to be so "evolved". You also have a program called FDAPM that halts the processor when in idle. FreeDOS supports long file names, FAT32 and reports itself to programs as DOS version 7.10.
All in all this is a modern distribution and full of features.

So, the next step was to install it to the hard drive and dual boot with Linux From Scratch using Grub.
I created a blank dos partition in the hard drive, downloaded FreeDOS 1.3rc4 and, not wanting to waste a CD-ROM, took advantage of QEMU and did this...

qemu installing FreeDOS 1.3rc4

You need to be root to do this. It's risky but it works. The trick here is to boot to the live environment, then run "setup adv"

setup adv

You will be in a new nice advanced installer that, at one point, asks you if you want to overwrite the MBR. The answer here is obviously "no" so that you do not destroy the GRUB installation.

DO NOT OVERWRITE ! ! !

After that, all that was left was to update /boot/grub/grub.cfg withmenuentry "Freedos 1.3rc4" {
        set root=(hd0,2)
        chainloader +1
}
Transferring new files to the DOS partition from Linux is easy, just mount it to a folder and copy away. The fist 2 things I transferred were the FD13LIVE.ISO and FD13BNS.ISO files and a copy of SHSUCDHD.EXE which, strangely, is not part of the distribution but can be found on the site of the package creator.

I kept playing with FreeDOS, installing and removing stuff and this is the pinnacle of my achievements:

Arachne

Browsing the internet in Arachne using a Wireless LAN Orinoco PCMCIA card.

Speaking of playing, FreeDOS also comes with lots of games and... to my dismay... a lot of the more complicated ones did not run correctly. I would see nothing but a black screen. This was very annoying, how could this be? Was this a FreeDOS or a Compaq problem? Surely it could not be FreeDOS, the games were part of the distribution itself. 

I kept thinking about this and then I remembered something, these lines in dmesg

Can't Claim BAR

What this means is that, while initializing, the Linux kernel reads the PCI configuration space, finds these addresses there and realises that they are wrong. Later on, it completely reconfigures all de devices to other addresses.
The reason why they are wrong is because I have 2GBytes of RAM on the laptop so, my RAM goes from 0x00000000 to 0x80000000. The BIOS is leaving the graphics card, the PCI and PCCard bridges and the USB controllers configured for addresses conflicting with RAM. This is a serious bug.
Linux is smart enough to realise this and fix it before passing the devices to their respective drivers but there is no such luck with DOS.
To test this I simply removed one of the 1Gbyte DIMM sticks and all the FreeDOS games started working properly.
How could I fix this? I did not want to have to remove a memory stick every time I wanted to play a a game...
I remembered how, in Linux you have the command setpci, which is part of the pciutils package.
Searching the net, I ended up here which shows us how to compile setpci and lspci for DOS. As a bonus, you also end up with a cross compiler. A very neat setup... 

And here is the solution. I wrote a batch file that changes the addresses of the AGP Bridge and the Radeon graphics card to addresses above 2Gbytes.

BAR Fix

But, could I still do better than this? As it turns out, I could, and I did...

BAR Fix using GRUB

... because GRUB also has a setpci command.
 
(Comments on this page are welcome - please email me at compaq(a.t.)edbatalha.info )

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