Both Lemote Fulong systems upgraded to 1GB
Hi All,
My P4 laptop died recently, which is a pain as I now have to look at replacing it in the near future… however, this has meant I now have 2GB of DDR400 SODIMMS that can be used in the Lemote systems.
There was a catch however. The PROM had to be flashed on one of the units so it would initialise the RAM properly, otherwise the kernel would b0rk. With this done, both units now recognise the 1GB sticks of RAM installed.
At present, both systems are available for developer use.
How to upgrade the PROM on the Fulong.
For the reference of others who may wish to perform this upgrade on their Lemote equipment. This is the procedure.
- Download pmon_v1.1.zip from this page and unpack it.
- Copy the pmon.bin file located inside, to your /boot partition (or somewhere else accessible to the PROM)
- Reboot, and hit ESC/DEL repeatedly to break into the PMON prompt.
- Type set, and write down any critical settings such as al and karg
- At the PMON prompt, enter the following command (adjust:path as appropriate)
load -r -f bfc00000 /dev/fs/ext2@wd0/pmon.bin - Restore the settings you wrote down using set arg value.
- Type reboot to reset the system.
If at step 5, the load fails, DO NOT REBOOT OR POWER OFF! Hit the up-arrow on your keyboard, double check the command, then press ENTER to execute it again.
I’d like to thank the members of the Lemote Forum community who provided the necessary infromation.
November 9th, 2008 at 10:55 pm
I have succeeded following your instructions. Thanks!
I am going to upgrade my 2E box’s ram, too.
However, I can’t find DDR 400 on HongKong’s market. :S
Will DDR 333 be ok?
November 9th, 2008 at 11:09 pm
Just checked the ram inside the box it is a DDR 333.
November 10th, 2008 at 8:54 am
That’s correct, they come with DDR333. Apparently the RAM only runs at about 108MHz in a Loongson 2E box, so DDR400 is massive overkill speed-wise, but I don’t know of a supplier of slower RAM in Brisbane. So DDR400 it was.
November 26th, 2008 at 2:46 pm
I have a 2E FuLoong. I installed a 1G SODIMM yesterday. I can see 1024M in PMON, before and after upgrading PMON, but 256 shows as LOW MEMORY and 768 as HIGHMEMORY (in PMON boot screen). I can `set` memsize and highmemsize to any value, which seems to get saved in flash, but after I reboot, PMON redetects 256/768 again, and resets those values. When I boot into Debian, it still only sees 256M.
Any clues on what I need to tweak?
November 26th, 2008 at 7:38 pm
Answering my own question, I need a 64-bit kernel (arch/mips/lemote/lm2e/setup.c does zip/zero/nothing with highmemsize in the 32 bit kernel code).
November 26th, 2008 at 10:09 pm
That’s correct… the thing to tweak is the kernel. There’s a kernel on my devspace at http://dev.gentoo.org/~redhatter/mips/loongson/ you can use to get things going quickly, it works fine with Debian (I dual-boot Debian and Gentoo on one of the Lemote boxes so I can use OpenOffice and Java) so that’d be an easy way to get going.
November 26th, 2008 at 11:25 pm
I grabbed the 2.6.26.2 kernel from ftp://www.bjlx.org.cn/loongson/etch/kernel (since I’m running etch). There’s also lots of other interesting and up-to-date sw under the loongson dir.