From: Alex Buell <redacted>
Date: Mon, 03 Jan 2011 20:33:21 +0000

On Mon, 2011-01-03 at 11:43 -0800, David Miller wrote:

quoted

From: Alex Buell <redacted>
Date: Mon, 03 Jan 2011 19:39:01 +0000

quoted

Secondly, is Linux fully capable of handling different graphic cards
simultaneously? For example, plug in a pair of monitors and have
consoles on both with disparate graphic cards i.e. XVR-500 and S3ViRGE
etc? 

Technically I don't think it can do it currently.  Maybe just for
kernel message logging, but not for actual login consoles.

One TTY device is marked as the "console" and that's where all
tty[0-9]+ devices get instantiated upon.

Hmm, maybe it would be nice to introduce that capability. How doable
would it be? I understand the BKL is going away, perhaps it would now be
easier to introduce such a facility?

It has nothing to do with the big kernel lock.

I've just started digging into the innards of the s3fb driver, my first
attempt provoked this, simply by commenting out the check to see if it's
not the primary device and exits with -ENODEV: 

Jan  3 20:16:29 sodium kernel: ERROR(1): Cheetah error trap taken
afsr[0030100000000000] afar[00000000000003d0] TL1(0)
Jan  3 20:16:29 sodium kernel: ERROR(1): TPC[105918d8] TNPC[105918dc]
O7[10591884] TSTATE[4411001606]
Jan  3 20:16:29 sodium kernel: ERROR(1): TPC<s3_pci_probe+0x194/0x63c
[s3fb]>
Jan  3 20:16:29 sodium kernel: ERROR(1): M_SYND(0),  E_SYND(0), Multiple
Errors, Privileged

I know, this is what happens if you call vga_*() with a NULL first parameter
on sparc64.  It's accessing garbage addresses.