Re: [PATCH 0/5] fbdev: tdfxfb: Make "unbooted" cards work

On 7/30/26 20:26, Daniel Palmer wrote:

Currently using voodoo cards that weren't booted by the video
BIOS aren't usable.

This means if you happen to have a proper - non-x86 - computer,
another card is the primary or you have a new BIOS that cannot
run the video BIOS tdfxfb would probe but you be staring at
"no signal detected".

This series implements manually booting cards using the
values from the video BIOS' own table.

Debugging was partially assisted by Claude Fable 5. I could not
work out why this would not work for months so I told it to
create a voodoo 3 emulation for QEMU to compare the BIOS against
my code. That made it obvious my init sequence matched the BIOS
but the VGA core wasn't running.

This has been tested on a real voodoo 3 in an x86-64 board.
I have some patches to add an interface for doing 3D rendering
that are not included in this series and 3D rendering is also
working so as far as I can tell everything is good.

Nice work!

Series applied to fbdev git tree.

Thanks for doing this!
Helge

  

Daniel Palmer (5):
   fbdev: tdfxfb: Add helper to read config table from BIOS
   fbdev: tdfxfb: Attempt to detect if the card wasn't booted
   fbdev: tdfxfb: Manually boot unbooted cards
   fbdev: tdfxfb: Wake the VGA core before programming the CRTC
   fbdev: tdfxfb: Program the initial video mode

  drivers/video/fbdev/tdfxfb.c | 151 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
  1 file changed, 151 insertions(+)