Re: Linux 2.5.51

[Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org>]

On Wed, 2002-12-11 at 10:25, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
> > Well, I'm not sure it quite works yet. Maybe unaccelerated, but anyway,
> > my version of radeonfb for 2.5 isn't accelerated yet anyway. I'll work
> > on that (or Ani will) now that the API is stable enough.
> 
> How well does this driver work if you don't have a firmware
> driver initialize the card? aka a pci option ROM.

Probably not at all
 
> I am interested because with LinuxBIOS it is still a pain to run
> PCI option roms, and I don't necessarily even have then if it a
> motherboard with video.  There are some embedded/non-x86 platforms
> with similar issues.  

Well, at least r128's and radeon's need the memory controller and PLLs
initialized by the BIOS/firmware, we don't have documentation about how
to acheive that ourselves (and this can depend on the specific wiring of
a given card anyway).

> My primary interest is in the cheap ATI Rage XL chip that is on many
> server board. PCI Vendor/device  id 1002:4752 (rev 27) from lspci.
> 
> If nothing else if some one could point me to some resources on
> how to get the appropriate documentation from the video chipset
> manufacturers I would be happy.
> 
> But I did want to at least point that running a system with out bios
> initialized video was certainly among the cases that are used.

This is not possible with most modern cards without specific POST code
provided by the chip manufacturer.

Ben.