On Thursday 03 January 2008, Luc Verhaegen wrote:
It was considered. I think there is a bigger picture than you might have realised. Torsten also pointed out a secondary issue.
CONFIG_CONSOLE_VGA is not the right solution in that case. Maybe CONFIG_VGA_ROM_RUN should be trivially introduced.
To not increase the obvious confusion further, I would call the option something negative, like ...SKIP_NON_VGA, so nobody assumes it enables any ROM execution. Maybe introduce this for v3.
I read your patch. I am still unsure of the case where there are vga class devices but we don't want a vga console (hint: GPU computing).
As one of the main radeonhd driver developers, i am rather acutely aware of gpgpu. But i fail to see the relevance of this here.
Indeed. PCI_ROM_RUN will do, regardless of the console.
It seems there is no way in your code to allow us to run the option ROMs for a "vga" device and not enable a vga console.
My patch allows this in the exact same manner as before. Please look at the resulting code.
The real question is: What happens the unerring linuxbios user only specificies only CONFIG_CONSOLE_VGA, and still expects it to work with a vga rom. But this is a purely an issue of bad former practice and bad documentation.
Nope, it's a *bug* noone has noticed until you tried. We can now fix the code or redefine the semantics. Your patch implicitly does the latter, and without further explanation I assumed you didn't understand them. Ron already mentioned this is v2, so I'd say let's go for it; original patch ACKed.
If you had mentioned that CONSOLE_VGA=1 PCI_ROM_RUN=0 does not compile and you are working on a free standing driver, that would have saved us from the irrelevant part of this discussion.
So if nobody objects I'll commit the original patch, after the west coast has had a chance to comment ;-)
Torsten