Bill / ALL
Thanks for the info. Looking around I see that there is some aged code in
the U-boot tree under the MIA board that is a BIOS emulator. Seems like a
huge mess to get a video card to turn on.
I am using a Freescale MPC8360 so yes, ppc architecture and thus the
problems with BIOS emulation with PCI.
Do we still need a BIOS emulator if we don't want to run the VGA console
during bootup, but only for post boot?
I.e. does the NVIDIA driver have enough smarts to initialize the card after
Linux is 100% booted up? I really only need to be able to use the graphics
card for user applications, and booting with it is not a requirement. If
somehow I could boot with the serial console, and then run a user mode
application that initiated the card?
-Russ
Russell McGuire wrote:
Next I have plugged in a nVidia GeForce FX5200 PCI card,
and compiled in the nvidafb driver.
I can see clearly the PCI card is being detected and the
nvidiafb driver is being registerd, it can even detect
the monitor I have connected.
However, when I enabled the kernel to use the framer
buffer console, by compiling in that feature, it just
'seems' to hang after the console_init call.
Hi Russ,
I got to the same point last year with an ATI PCI card on a MPC8560
system. At this stage, I believe that to get the card displaying
graphics you will need to run the card's Video BIOS to initialise the
card correctly.
I'm guessing that you are running a PPC cpu :-) and that the FX5200 is a
consumer x86 graphics card. If so, the Video BIOS will be x86
instructions and you will need to run it with an emulator.
A company called SciTech is maintaining an x86emu project for doing
this:
http://www.scitechsoft.com/products/dev/x86_emulator.html
I believe that Xorg also has a x86emu module, so I was going to see if I
could get an Xorg installation going and let it do it's magic.
For us, getting Xorg running would prove the graphics capability of our
platform and we can start writing a GUI. Then it would be just a matter
of getting uBoot to display something during boot to keep the customers
happy...
Bill
I got a patch against 2.6 kernel from Scitechsoft last year and we
brought up ATI card on PPC platform using that. U-boot shares the same
emulator as the one Scitechsoft uses however the latter is a newer
version. Yes you can use an unchanged u-boot(i.e. no video emulation
under u-boot at all), merge the video-patch to your kernel to use ATI
card directly. You can boot with serial port then the kernel will
activate video console and x-windows.
if you need the patch, I can send it to you offline.
xianghua
Russell McGuire wrote:
Bill / ALL
Thanks for the info. Looking around I see that there is some aged code in
the U-boot tree under the MIA board that is a BIOS emulator. Seems like a
huge mess to get a video card to turn on.
I am using a Freescale MPC8360 so yes, ppc architecture and thus the
problems with BIOS emulation with PCI.
Do we still need a BIOS emulator if we don't want to run the VGA console
during bootup, but only for post boot?
I.e. does the NVIDIA driver have enough smarts to initialize the card after
Linux is 100% booted up? I really only need to be able to use the graphics
card for user applications, and booting with it is not a requirement. If
somehow I could boot with the serial console, and then run a user mode
application that initiated the card?
-Russ
Russell McGuire wrote:
quoted
Next I have plugged in a nVidia GeForce FX5200 PCI card,
and compiled in the nvidafb driver.
I can see clearly the PCI card is being detected and the
nvidiafb driver is being registerd, it can even detect
the monitor I have connected.
However, when I enabled the kernel to use the framer
buffer console, by compiling in that feature, it just
'seems' to hang after the console_init call.
Hi Russ,
I got to the same point last year with an ATI PCI card on a MPC8560
system. At this stage, I believe that to get the card displaying
graphics you will need to run the card's Video BIOS to initialise the
card correctly.
I'm guessing that you are running a PPC cpu :-) and that the FX5200 is a
consumer x86 graphics card. If so, the Video BIOS will be x86
instructions and you will need to run it with an emulator.
A company called SciTech is maintaining an x86emu project for doing
this:
http://www.scitechsoft.com/products/dev/x86_emulator.html
I believe that Xorg also has a x86emu module, so I was going to see if I
could get an Xorg installation going and let it do it's magic.
For us, getting Xorg running would prove the graphics capability of our
platform and we can start writing a GUI. Then it would be just a matter
of getting uBoot to display something during boot to keep the customers
happy...
Bill
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Russell McGuire wrote:
Thanks for the info. Looking around I see that there
is some aged code in the U-boot tree under the MIA
board that is a BIOS emulator. Seems like a huge mess
to get a video card to turn on.
Yes, I came across that code in my investigation as well. As Xiao points
out in his email, this code is an earlier version of the SciTech code.
I didn't get around to comparing it with the Xorg code either.
I am using a Freescale MPC8360 so yes, ppc
architecture and thus the problems with BIOS emulation
with PCI.
Do we still need a BIOS emulator if we don't want to
run the VGA console during bootup, but only for post
boot?
I'm pretty sure that you don't need uboot to do the emulation if you
don't need graphics at this point. As long as you are happy to wait
until Xorg has started before you can display anything.
I.e. does the NVIDIA driver have enough smarts to
initialize the card after Linux is 100% booted up?
I really only need to be able to use the graphics card
for user applications, and booting with it is not a
requirement. If somehow I could boot with the serial
console, and then run a user mode application that
initiated the card?
I think you will find that the Xorg driver will use it's own x86emu to
initialise the card properly when X starts. I haven't confirmed this
myself yet, I guess I need to look at the Xorg code and then actually
try it out. This was the impression that I got from talking to one of
the video driver hackers at Linux.Conf.au a couple of weeks back,
specifically about running x86 graphics cards on PPC.
Are you able to get your kernel to mount a PPC distro via NFS so that
you have a full Xorg installation to test with, without having to build
it yourself ?
Bill