Commen=
t # 3
on bug 10716=
8
from Alex Deucher
(In reply to Paul Menzel from comment #2)
> (In reply to Alex Deucher from comment #1)
> > You need the firmware for initialization.
>=20
> What=E2=80=99s the technical reason for this. Why can=E2=80=99t certai=
n parts of the
> hardware be initialized later on?
You can't do anything other than very limited modesetting until the firmwar=
es
are loaded. You might as well just use the efifb driver and then load the
driver later after the filesystem is available. There's not really anything
you can initialize without firmware. MC and SMC firmware are required to
adjust the clocks which is required for performance and for bandwidth
requirements for high res display configurations. You can't use the SDMA
hardware without firmware so that means no GPU memory management or GPU VM
updates and you are limited to 256 MB of vram (PCI BAR size) on most platfo=
rms.
You can't use the gfx/compute engines without the CP firmware. You can't =
use
the multi-media engines without firmware. Etc. Not to mention you now have
multiple code paths to validate at the hw and sw level.