Quote Originally Posted by terramir View Post
I looked at what you said and I was thinking how would that work since in order to support that you would need some power thing to go on as well, if I remember correctly, unless the chipset used could support it, i.e. the nvidia mcp 55 supports shanghai on other boards (btw that's where you should be looking) in some fashion I find it unlikely to be possible.
DDPM (split power planes) is required for Istanbul, but not Shanghai. The only limiting factor is microcode and AGESA, and AGESA is a binary blob provided by AMD that does not vary between boards (for the same version).. It does all the intialization magic including, I guess, therefore, detecting and enabling DDPM support if it is there. Nothing to do with 'chipset' - remember mcp55 is little more than a southbridge.

We can extract AGESA from one board's BIOS and insert it into another, but so far we have been unsuccessful in getting the new BIOS to go with the change. Forgive me for my cloudiness as it has been at least a year since I was working on this.

You may also want to speak to the Coreboot guys - they wrote, from scratch, their own initialization code for quad-cores - I assume because AGESA didn't meet their license criteria.

I am unsure how much things vary between EFI and BIOS but donating a board to Coreboot developers to get them to add support may be a way to get ACPI support, if hacking the current BIOS is unsuccessful.