Re: ATI Rage XL with no BIOS support

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

On Tue, 2006-02-21 at 12:45 -0800, Jay Cotton wrote:
> Basically you are screwed.
> 
> There is a way to fix this, but the code is closed source and ATI will not
> allow it out of there control.  So, unless you can read the bios prom
> into memory and execute the first 1024 bytes in 16bit mode, you will not
> be able to recover.

First 1024 bytes ? hrm... that isn't much... doesn't seem to work much
for me. I have a board with a Rage Mobility, ATI gave us a BIOS image,
I've tried running it in an x86 emulator (it's a ppc machine) to no
avail so far. That BIOS appears to be mucking around with all sort of
things not directly related to the actual video chip, like strange IO
ports all around the legacy space (more than just the timers) etc...

Ben.




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