Helge Hafting [off-list ref] wrote:

On 14-10-2004 21:02:36, Kendall Bennett wrote:

quoted

Hello All,

[...]

quoted

So what we would like to find out is how much interest there might be
in
both an updated VESA framebuffer console driver as well as the code
for
the Video card BOOT process being contributed to the maintstream
kernel.

The BOOT stuff is very interesting.  Currently, both my videocards
(in the same pc) have nice hw-specific framebuffer drivers, but
they require that the card is initialized by the bios first and
this only ever happens to one of the cards.  Xfree _can_ do the
job, but way too late for setting up the framebuffer device. 

Exactly.

quoted

If there is interest, we would start out by first contributing the
core
emulator and Video BOOT code, and then work on building a better VESA
framebuffer console driver.

Having video BOOT would be great, and please make it independent of
the framebuffer drivers.  

Right now it is independent but I added a single line of code to the 
Radeon driver to init the card prior to initing the rest of the driver. 
It can be done earlier than that inside fbmem.c, but I wasn't sure how to 
set up the code so it would only POST each card as it is needed as I 
don't want to bring up secondary controllers unless the user actually 
wants this.

How does the framebuffer console system handle secondary controllers 
right now? It seems from my look at the code that it only brings up the 
primary and not the secondary?

I might want to try your vesa driver, but I might also want to use
the hw-accelerated chip specific driver that happens to need an
initialized video card. 

Yep, you could use either. In fact you could even use the VGA text 
console driver on PowerPC and MIPS platforms provided the kernel 
correctly sets up the proper VGA resource mappings (which many embedded 
kernels do not do).

Regards,

---
Kendall Bennett
Chief Executive Officer
SciTech Software, Inc.
Phone: (530) 894 8400
http://www.scitechsoft.com

~ SciTech SNAP - The future of device driver technology! ~