[PLUG] e7500 intel chipset Linux and KVM...

[michael at robinson-west.com]

Before I go deep, my brother is trying to fix up his Quad QSP-2 assembler. Unfortunately, Tyco chose to use Windows 98SE for the gui head because the original system was DOS based. The assembler places surface mount parts and very small parts on circuit boards and can do so very fast. PPM owns the Quad QSP-2 now. We suspect that the bugs we are fighting are in 98se, but we can get a newer copy of Q-Soft from PPM for about $500.

The SBC my brother is trying to use is a Trenton XPI with an e7500 Intel chipset. Windows 98se has problems with the firmware hub and pnp bios conflicting.
Since it's a Xeon processor running at up to 2.4 ghz, the option of running Linux and KVM to force Windows 98se to work is a possible option that needs to be evaluated.

The ISA shared memory card requires the following memory resources:

memory: D0000 - D7FFF
I/O: 0380-0383
IRQ: 11

Linux would need to map the resources to the ISA bus to the KVM virtual machine...

We tried dropping from 1 gigabyte down to 512 megs, no luck cleaning up QSoft crashing. We are still getting page faults.

The thought has occured to replace himem.sys in 98se with freedos's himemx.exe as a workaround so we can use more memory.

Strangely, QSoft crashes when you try to change from the first area to the second area attempting to calibrate the rails.

The problem with the Intel chipset drivers is finding the correct one and getting it to slipstream in. We weren't successful. Linux and
KVM would be a possible way to work around this. Windows 98SE was not designed to run on Xeon based processors with PCI-E internal
and other things like an 800MHz FSB.

Does anyone know if Chips and Technology integrated video card can be disabled at all? Windows 98se ignores the bios disable :-( We don't need
the internal card if we use a PCI NVIDIA 6200.

Whatever Linux flavor we would use, it needs to be lightweight and needs to support the hardware fully as well as a KVM environment to run 98se in.
It occurs to me that we can try for a hotter SBC if the backplane we have will support it. The biggest problem is that the backplane has to support
reset and not all of them do.

If Linux and KVM will work, that opens up modern SBC's which are free of CMOS rot and other circuitry breaking down because of age. We can potentially
use something new if we can effectively emulate what 98se needs.

Looks like a lot of patches are needed to get Windows 98SE to work directly on this hardware, which is really difficult to set up correctly. By the time all the needed patches are found and applied in the proper order, it may be easier and more fruitful to set up Linux and KVM.

Michael Robinson