Re: PCI nvidiafb card init with a broken BIOS?

Richard Purdie wrote:

Hi,

I have a Dell Poweredge 1600SC which is a Dual P4 Xeon system with an
inbuilt ATI Rage XL. It has a variety of PCI slots and I tried inserting
a PCI XFX Geforce FX 5200 256mb into it to upgrade its graphics
capability as the inbuilt Rage XL can't cope with the resolutions I want
to use.

Whilst the machine boots with the new card in, I see nothing on any of
the video outputs from the BIOS or Linux. It looks like the BIOS can't
cope with the card. (I've tried the card in each PCI slot).

I've included the Linux bootup below for 2.6.15-rc2. nvidiafb does load
but the video memory size looks wrong and it pauses for a long time
before printing "DMA Get lockup".  Reading Dell's forums, it looks like
the inbuilt card is moved in memory rather than disabled and you can see
this being detected as fb1 but again, no video output from it.

Its a long shot but it there any way I can get Linux to correctly init
the PCI card and undo any damage done by the broken BIOS? Would
disabling ACPI help or is there anything else I can try?

Does vesafb work for this card?

You can also try to compile nvidiafb as a module, then initialize the card
with a user land app (ie, lrmi or X), before a modprobe nvidiafb.

Tony


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