Re: [PATCH] Provide control of active VGA device on PCI systems

[Jesse Barnes <jbarnes@sgi.com>]

On Saturday, February 19, 2005 11:07 pm, Jon Smirl wrote:
> New version to previous patch. This one adds the hotplug event mentioned
> before.
>
> To achieve secondary card reset:
>   Load a framebuffer driver.
>   Driver causes hotplug add event
>   reset=x environment parm indicates reset, primary cards is false
>   run user space reset program
>   read VBIOS content using existing API
>   turn off all VGA devices, sysfs vga=3
>   reset the card
>   restore original VGA devices. sysfs vga=4
>   set sysfs no_reset=1 to prevent further resets
>
> Tomorrow I'll clean up a user space reset app and post it.

Nice, if this is combined with Ben's suggestion of using a firmware loader 
type model to deal with POSTing, it seems like we're in pretty good shape.  
Can you add documentation for this API to 
Documentation/filesystems/sysfs-<foo>.txt (maybe the pci file or a new file) 
so that userspace people will be able to figure out how to use it?

Also, how does one know if a card is 'primary' or not?  I.e. some BIOSes will 
POST all cards, some will POST only one, and some will POST none...

Thanks,
Jesse


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