Z170 and EHCI emulation

Good day all.

I realize I'm a bit early asking for opinions, but for the first time
since motherboards with a classic PCI bus, we get motherboards where we
can use a PCIe slot without loosing 1/2 the board's slots, USB ports, M2
slots, etc in the process (thanks to Intel finally realizing that 8 PCIe
lanes in the PCH was not enough).

So I'm all excited by this new chipset, but the lack of EHCI is going to
make 1/2 my boot disks useless. This smells of Microsoft asking for
something that makes installing W7 a pain and Intel doing it. However,
apparently there is EHCI emulation in the BIOS, and this is what I am
curious about; anyone tested this yet? How well does it work?

Thank you.
Best Regards,

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B00ze wrote:
Good day all.

I realize I'm a bit early asking for opinions, but for the first time
since motherboards with a classic PCI bus, we get motherboards where we
can use a PCIe slot without loosing 1/2 the board's slots, USB ports, M2
slots, etc in the process (thanks to Intel finally realizing that 8 PCIe
lanes in the PCH was not enough).

So I'm all excited by this new chipset, but the lack of EHCI is going to
make 1/2 my boot disks useless. This smells of Microsoft asking for
something that makes installing W7 a pain and Intel doing it. However,
apparently there is EHCI emulation in the BIOS, and this is what I am
curious about; anyone tested this yet? How well does it work?

Thank you.
Best Regards,


This article didn't leave things as clear as I
would like.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9485/i...vga-supermicro

"One big shock will be for Windows 7 users. By default, the
Z170 chipset and BIOS will not support full USB 2.0
Enhanced Host Controller (EHCI) mode. This means that for
a number of circumstances, USB devices will not work unless
an XHCI environment is in play.

In our testing, this means that in order to install Windows 7
you need to do the following:

* Navigate to BIOS
* Enable "Windows 7 Installation" or "EHCI mode", Save and Exit.
* Have your Windows 7 image on an optical disk.
USB sticks will not work!
* Install the OS as normal via the optical media.
Install OS drivers/USB 3.0 drivers.
* Disable the BIOS option.
"

What would you do if you had a netbook without optical drive ?

And from the comments section

"ASRock have a workaround for the win7-install-via-USB stick
situation. Found it in the z170m pro4s manual on p.41
(Win7 USB Patcher"

I was thinking slipstream, but I guess they beat me to it.

That's a pretty serious shortcoming. I guess I
won't be owning one of those, "emulation" or not.
A whole lot of gimmicks and not a lot of meat.

The thing is, it's my gut feeling from playing
with all these desktop OSes, that they're not
ready for high I/O rates. So for all those people
wishing for some expensive Flash storage device with
more than 500MB/sec, what's the point ? The OS is
the bottleneck now, not the hardware. There's not much
reason to drool over the storage options on these
things, in my opinion. And how I reach these
conclusions, is by loading whole OSes into RAM,
storage and all, and they don't go very fast at all.

I thought this platform was supposed to be a replacement
for the full-range LGA1150 ? I've got no PCI slots for
my older hardware. And after all the USB fuss, I still
see motherboards with dual PS/2 connectors :-)

Paul

On 2015-08-11 05:42, Paul wrote:

B00ze wrote:
Good day all.

I realize I'm a bit early asking for opinions, but for the first time
since motherboards with a classic PCI bus, we get motherboards where
we can use a PCIe slot without loosing 1/2 the board's slots, USB
ports, M2 slots, etc in the process (thanks to Intel finally realizing
that 8 PCIe lanes in the PCH was not enough).

So I'm all excited by this new chipset, but the lack of EHCI is going
to make 1/2 my boot disks useless. This smells of Microsoft asking for
something that makes installing W7 a pain and Intel doing it. However,
apparently there is EHCI emulation in the BIOS, and this is what I am
curious about; anyone tested this yet? How well does it work?

Thank you.
Best Regards,


This article didn't leave things as clear as I
would like.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9485/i...vga-supermicro

"One big shock will be for Windows 7 users. By default, the
Z170 chipset and BIOS will not support full USB 2.0
Enhanced Host Controller (EHCI) mode. This means that for
a number of circumstances, USB devices will not work unless
an XHCI environment is in play.

Lol, this is where I learned of the missing EHCI (I also visited Tom's
Hardware but I found their review lacking, and no mention of the missing
EHCI controller).

In our testing, this means that in order to install Windows 7
you need to do the following:

* Navigate to BIOS
* Enable "Windows 7 Installation" or "EHCI mode", Save and Exit.
* Have your Windows 7 image on an optical disk.
USB sticks will not work!
* Install the OS as normal via the optical media.
Install OS drivers/USB 3.0 drivers.
* Disable the BIOS option.
"

What would you do if you had a netbook without optical drive ?

And from the comments section

"ASRock have a workaround for the win7-install-via-USB stick
situation. Found it in the z170m pro4s manual on p.41
(Win7 USB Patcher"

I was thinking slipstream, but I guess they beat me to it.

But how do you emulate a USB controller? I mean, if some driver hits the
hardware registers directly, how is the BIOS going to monitor that and
respond?

That's a pretty serious shortcoming. I guess I
won't be owning one of those, "emulation" or not.
A whole lot of gimmicks and not a lot of meat.

It's annoying yes, but the upside is that everything on the board works
together, no more loosing the 3 PCIe x1 slots if you're using the PCIe
x4 slot - that's a big improvement for me.

The thing is, it's my gut feeling from playing
with all these desktop OSes, that they're not
ready for high I/O rates. So for all those people
wishing for some expensive Flash storage device with
more than 500MB/sec, what's the point ? The OS is
the bottleneck now, not the hardware. There's not much
reason to drool over the storage options on these
things, in my opinion. And how I reach these
conclusions, is by loading whole OSes into RAM,
storage and all, and they don't go very fast at all.

Ya well, windows was never known to have low latency, lol! I must admit
I was really disappointed by the performance of the single USB3 port I
have on the laptop, but I do not have the right device for it: a hard
disk is not exactly the right thing for USB3 speed tests. For faster
disk I/O you need to look at that Intel 750 PCIe/U2 SSD, much faster
than SATA ones...

I thought this platform was supposed to be a replacement
for the full-range LGA1150 ? I've got no PCI slots for
my older hardware. And after all the USB fuss, I still
see motherboards with dual PS/2 connectors :-)

I'm willing to ditch all classic PCI cards I have. But I haven't looked
at many motherboards yet, maybe some still carry PCI 33/66 MHz slots.
And yes, I see those P/S2 connectors too, it's funny in a way, but it
could also be the only way to get some pre-xHCI programs working (e.g.
DOS tools).

I was really hoping someone would jump in and say "Hey, motherboard XYZ
has a real USB2 controller on it" - I fail to understand why none of the
boards I looked at promoted that as a feature, which I interpret as none
of them having a real USB2 controller on board...

Best Regards,

--
! _\|/_ Sylvain /
! (o o) Member-+-David-Suzuki-Fdn/EFF/Red+Cross/Planetary-Society-+-
oO-( )-Oo Windows error 08 Broken window, watch for glass fragments.

B00ze wrote:


I was really hoping someone would jump in and say "Hey, motherboard XYZ
has a real USB2 controller on it" - I fail to understand why none of the
boards I looked at promoted that as a feature, which I interpret as none
of them having a real USB2 controller on board...

The motherboard companies don't have "real" BIOS writers.
They get their BIOS from Award/AMI/Phoenix/Insyde and
the BIOS is modular and they add code modules to it.
As a result, they don't have the latitude to do
just anything they want. The reason you're seeing
a uniform refusal to add back USB2, is no BIOS
company made provision for it. And it's just too
hard for them to write the necessary code themselves.
I would expect boot code in particular, to be
missing from any USB2 add-on support module.

And if they were to write their own BIOS from
scratch, imagine the mess that would make :-)

There was an effort a while back, to create a
"Linux BIOS", but I don't know what became of
that project. You'd still have to find someone
to write more code.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coreboot

Paul

Paul writes:

There was an effort a while back, to create a
"Linux BIOS", but I don't know what became of
that project. You'd still have to find someone
to write more code.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coreboot

LinuxBios became Coreboot and it's even supported on some reasonably new
Thinkpads. Otherwise it's pretty much something one might use in an
embedded project or an industrial PC I think.

On 2015-08-11 20:26, Paul wrote:

B00ze wrote:

I was really hoping someone would jump in and say "Hey, motherboard
XYZ has a real USB2 controller on it" - I fail to understand why none
of the boards I looked at promoted that as a feature, which I
interpret as none of them having a real USB2 controller on board...

The motherboard companies don't have "real" BIOS writers.
They get their BIOS from Award/AMI/Phoenix/Insyde and
the BIOS is modular and they add code modules to it.
As a result, they don't have the latitude to do
just anything they want. The reason you're seeing
a uniform refusal to add back USB2, is no BIOS
company made provision for it. And it's just too
hard for them to write the necessary code themselves.
I would expect boot code in particular, to be
missing from any USB2 add-on support module.

Yeah, you could be right. But then how hard is it for BIOS companies to
port their existing EHCI modules to the new BIOSes. This is really
annoying me, I think those new boards are great, but I will be forced to
use "EHCI Emulation" for a year or more while everybody scrambles to
include xHCI drivers into their tools - for example, the Partition
Wizard boot disk is based on Linux; do they have an xHCI driver?
Unknown; Will EHCI emulation work? I don't know :-(

And if they were to write their own BIOS from
scratch, imagine the mess that would make :-)

They should have hardware programmers that can write modules, like an
EHCI module ;-)

There was an effort a while back, to create a
"Linux BIOS", but I don't know what became of
that project. You'd still have to find someone
to write more code.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coreboot

Paul

Interesting, it doesn't even run the SMM code...

Regards,

--
! _\|/_ Sylvain /
! (o o) Member-+-David-Suzuki-Fdn/EFF/Red+Cross/Planetary-Society-+-
oO-( )-Oo Error reading FAT Record. Try the skinny one (y/n)?