Mysterious UEFI Behavior on Biostar AM1MH with AMI v4 BIOS

[Eschaton]

Actually, on second thought, this is probably a waste of time. Biostar may have accidentally included all the multipliers in their UEFI and been sloppy enough to allow me to see them, but the die on the APU itself is probably laser cut to disable higher multipliers, just like you said, DeathBringer. I'm not sure what's up with the 5350 being able to change its clock a small amount, but at this point I don't think we will be able to find out why that's possible and this isn't.

Oh well - learned a LOT doing all of this and hopefully I can go back and mess with some old socket 775 BIOSes next!

[DeathBringer]

Can you change Custom P-States to Enable in that case?

[Eschaton]

Can you change Custom P-States to Enable in that case?

I can! But it doesn't change my options below.

[DeathBringer]

OK. I think it's my mistake. I'll try to change.

[DeathBringer]

Try my second mod.

[Eschaton]

Try my second mod.

Hey presto! It perfectly exposes the menus!

Bad news: overclocking and overvolting don't work. SOMETHING changes, because when I set an OC, the CPUFreq applet in lubuntu doesn't properly detect the frequency anymore, but benchmarks show no improvement at all and CPU-Z in WinPE proves the multi goes no higher than x22.

So, maybe you were right and this CPU cannot be overclocked after all. Still, you should at least be able to overvolt. And I'm confused by the fact that linux sees some kind of change in what the UEFI is reporting to CPUFreq. I will take a look at your modded file myself later on; I think the problem might be in how it writes changes back - maybe there's a validation step I have to disable or something like that...

[DeathBringer]

Save my useless mod. I'm going to delete it.

[Eschaton]

Save my useless mod. I'm going to delete it.

Don't worry, I have it. But why do you say it was useless? I'm sorry if I made you angry...

[DeathBringer]

Not problem, but I've delete it.

[Eschaton]

Just a quick update on work I've been doing on this motherboard - I'm taking a break from trying to learn whether there's anything I can do to the original AMI UEFI because I don't think there is, BUT - looks like there's interest in modding the UEFI/BIOS for this series from other people!

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Biostar-AM1ML-Coreboot-Port

The AM1ML is a very, very similar motherboard to the AM1MH that I've been working with, so I will probably be taking a chance and flashing this coreboot image soon, just to see what else I can learn about this firmware platform in the process.

Wish me luck!