coreboot

The first 16GB DDR3L was released last year, and for Intel platforms, only Broadwell and some Atom SoCs support it. However, in the compatibility list[2], it is said that many existing boards that supports DDR3 support 16GB DDR3L, and CPUs on X79 boards can support it with a modified MRC. So I think it's possible to be supported on a Sandy/Ivy Bridge machine.

The raminit logs show that coreboot does the memory init, and the code in romstage that should be run in memory works fine, but it crashes on payload stage.

(The following is what I wrote on the mailing list)

Hi,

I'm tesing to see if the coreboot Sandy/Ivy MRC supports 16GB DIMMs. Here's my result.

I'm using a MT16KTF2G64HZ-1G6A1[1]. My machine is Lenovo T420 with i7-3630QM. With this module inserted (I've tested 16G+0 and 16G+8G), the system can light up, but it'll then get crashed.

• with GRUB2 payload, it'll crash after the payload loads
• with SeaBIOS payload with proprietary VGABIOS, I can see the prompt, and can boot to a GRUB or syslinux loader on my USB stick, but when I try to boot a system, it get crashed. If I boot to Memtest86+ on my USB stick, the system will crash when memtest starts to test the memory.

And another thing I can see is, the first boot can boot to payload, but the second boot will fail. I think it's caused by the MRC cache.

I'm still wondering if Sandy/Ivy northbridge can support 16GB DIMMs. I'll give a more detailed EHCI debug output later. According to [2], I think the incompatibility is an MRC issue instead of hardware incompatibility.

[1] https://www.micron.com/parts/modules/ddr3-sdram/mt16ktf2g64hz-1g6?pc={E1D8F1A9-3DFC-4BD2-8A1E-C26ED261EB0A}
[2] http://www.intelligentmemory.com/fileadmin/download/compatibilitylist.pdf