I’m quietly hoping they will backport the functionality on the xe driver to alchemist, but agree looking less likely.
If I have to buy a b60 then so be it, but I’d like to keep this a770 in use for a while longer, it is a good little card.
One thing I’ve not seen is if the b50 card also supports sr-iov, if so that would open up some fun options for low power systems
Exciting times though… any excuse for a new build
I do happen to have a Flex 170 or two, but there’s no way I’m getting what you guys need without clipping, is there?
Intel open source SR-IOV and I there next customer…
I’m sure competition will open AMD and nvidia. I will remember but if it happens
If we’re after the entire ROM image, the most reliable way would be to desolder ROM chip off the board. Don’t know if there are other ways like debug header or something similar on Flex 170.
I hope @Forge sees your post and comes up with a better solution though, maybe there is no need to dump entire ROM, only a region of it.
Desolder? It seems I wouldn’t even have to take the backplate off.
Pretty sure this is where all firmware lives. You just clip one of these things on it:
I am not sure that reflashing whatever’s in here on an A770 would get you to where you want to be though, unless everything about the card is in NVRAM. I’m thinking of things like the PCI vendor/product code, which is probably fused in the ASIC.
But then again, I have no idea, which is why I was asking what you guys needed.
Instead of desoldering look for a clip like this:
Just make sure it’s the right size.
Single slot, low profile would be great, but I don’t have high hopes.
I think vendor and product code would not suffice. DeviceID seems to be 56C0 for Flex170 and 56A0 for A770, but I don’t think that’s the hard part.
I tried quick and dirty trick by text-searching for DEV_ID in SR-IOV-enabled drivers from Intel repository, repaced 56C0 for 56A0 in i915_pciids.h (and some other places I don’t remember) and tried to install that. It installs but device variables that control VFs did not appear, therefore commands to enable and manage VFs obviously did nothing. I did not have more time to investigate and stopped there.
So either I was doing something wrong, or there’s more to it and some part in firmware that accepts commands for enabling VFs in Flex FW is missing in A770 FW. That’s why I believe FW dump would be a good starting point, but not necessarily the only one.
This chip on your first photo does appear to be the flash chip with firmware, and trying reading it would be nice indeed. At the same time I don’t really trust the clips referenced in Mandaril’s post, had mixed results with those – e.g. borrowed a clip once, tried to dump BIOS from a motheboard and received 3 bit-different results in 3 reads. Maybe I had bad luck with mine.
(post deleted by author)
