Well, I'm definitely making some progress with the epia m vga.
I downloaded the very latest freebios from CVS and I see that I was indeed
missing the shadow copy stuff in mainboard.c and also, I was using the wrong
value for the vt8623 PCI id. Now, I have a different problem. I'm able to
get XFree86 4.3 to start up on tty0 but it complains about AGP, DRI and linear
memory. I believe there's a post about that but it didn't mention a fix. I
get no output on the monitor until then. Adding AGP support in the 2.6.6
kernel causes the system to hang after the driver is loaded. I'll compile a
2.4 kernel + maybe enable framebuffer support in the kernel to test. Other
things that I've tried so far is to enable VIDEO_CONSOLE and the fixup code but
I still don't get any output prior to X starting up. I'm currently clueless
about why video mode + PCX loading stuff can be done even before the PCI
stuff. The upside to all this is that I'm now very familiar with the code. I
know there's stuff in the FAQ, but would anyone object if I posted a map of
the code for the epia m from entry16 all the way to elfboot() as an example?
I've drawn such a map to help navigate through the directories and code and
IMHO all the cool stuff happens at hardwaremain(), anyway. Cheers and thanks
for all the help.