[finnix] EeePC - manual HW submission & booting issue

[Nazo]

Well, first of all, I'm wondering about something.  What is the
official way to manually submit hardware information?  I didn't see
any mention of it on the site nor did it say anything about how in the
finnix-hwsubmit texts that I saw.  I sent to the main e-mail address
listed on the site but never got a response.  Well, it's not realistic
to get a response on everything like this obviously, but I must admit
that I am curious if it was received.  More importantly, when manual
submissions become necessary, exactly how should one submit it
manually?  It occured to me that perhaps you intend for it to be
submitted via this list?  It's fairly small so I'm going to go ahead
and attach it for now.  Whatever means should be used, perhaps a note
to this effect on the main site at the very least would be a good idea
to prevent confusion?  Attached is the output from finnix-hwsubmit.  I
went ahead and let it collect ALL information because the "potentially
private" information really isn't going to be all that important I
think (especially since I may not even have this system for much
longer.)

Note that the reason I need a manual submission is because neither the
ethernet nor WiFi interfaces appear to be working correctly.  The
EeePC is a surprisingly cheap little machine that is turning out to be
quite popular, so I think it may be well worth looking into.
Especially since hardware will be known as there is currently little
variance in these machines with the CPU being the biggest change
across models.  I think even the newer 900 models have most internal
hardware the same with the biggest changes being the larger display
and storage and non-underclocked CPU.  Fix support for one and it
likely fixes them all.

Also, I'm having an issue related to booting Finnix on my EeePC.
Booting it normally works just fine as far as I know (I haven't had a
problem yet at least.)  However, it's not liking booting from the
internal drive.  I should note here that I'm not really using an
"installed" copy.  I don't like dedicating a whole partition
specifically to Finnix, I like how it can be smaller thanks to the
usage of compression, it is harder to upgrade, and several other
reasons.  With storage real estate so tight on the EeePC this becomes
more important especially.  My method is to have a single EXT3
partition running Extlinux and place the kernel, initial ramdrive, and
filesystem image for live distros such as Finnix onto this partition.
This works great most of the time though I did have some issues with
bootable CDs trying to use the filesystem image on the harddrive then
failing with numerous errors because they were different versions,
however I solved this by using the finnixfile argument and changing
the filename (btw, I still stick to my argument that each version
should have a differently named file like finnix.910 for 91.0,
finnix.892 for 89.2, and so on and snapshots just using the date using
hexadecimal instead or something like that to differentiate.  This way
such issues not only never arise as it would default to only using the
same version anyway, but it's more clear which files are which.)

Now every computer I've set up with this works fine except for one:
my EeePC.  It starts booting up just fine in each case, however SOME
of the time it will freeze up just after stating the processor
information.  My initial thought (and what I stated in the hwsubmit
text) was that maybe it could be related to power saving features as
I've seen issues in the past with various distros enabling PowerNow!
and other such things and trying to automatically underclock a CPU to
save power but not always working right.  In particular, this goes
REALLY badly when you have manual overrides in the BIOS on voltages
and such for overclocking.  I had issues with this on my previous
Athlon 64 based PC as some distros would think they were lowering the
clock rates a lot but really not nearly enough for the voltage
decrease they set since I had the multiplier lower.  This made me
wonder if a similar thing could be going in the other direction as the
EeePC comes with a factory underclocked CPU (a 900MHz CPU underclocked
to 630MHz in the 8G and 4G and an 800MHz CPU underclocked to 571MHz in
the 2G models.)  This is kind of going in the opposite direction, but
with attempts to mess with voltages and multipliers that aren't the
right parameters it is easily imaginable that it could go unstable
(especially if it tries to go up as it seems you must increase the
PCI-E bus to go beyond a certain point for whatever reason.)  Since
the internal storage runs off of the PCI-E I thought this might be
related.  However, I noticed that when I boot it from a USB drive, it
ends using the filesystem image stored on the internal storage and
while it can kind of take a while between when it shows the processor
information and when it moves on, it hasn't frozen once yet when I'm
booting from the USB drive...  I thought perhaps it may just be taking
even longer when using the internal storage for some reason (though I
believe the internal SSD is probably faster than my USB flash drive --
I'm not really sure though as I haven't really directly tested this)
but so far no matter how long I waited it didn't seem to move on.
I'll admit I didn't wait really excessive lengths of time (it's kind
of useless to me anyway if it's going to require 20 minutes to start
up or something...)  I really kind of wanted to get this running from
the internal drive though.  I'm hoping later to be able to use it for
diagnostics without having to carry anything but the EeePC itself at
times.
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