I have a Tyan S2895 motherboard with an nVidia GeForce 6200 TurboCache addon card (nVidia NX6200TC-TD64EB). I seem to be having problems that appear, at this point, to be related to the executing the Option ROM code using the X86 emulator code.
When LinuxBIOS (v2-2174) executes it detects the addon card and reports it as PCI device 03:00.0 (last PCI device in system - motherboard slot 1 PCI-E x16). This card has an Expansion ROM (a.k.a. Option ROM) and it is detected by LinuxBIOS. I have verified that the function pci_rom_load() correctly copies the image from the ROM to memory at 0xc0000 (copies 0xf600 bytes). I have also verified that 0xc0000 is empty (contains all 0x00) prior to the copy occuring. After the Expansion ROM is loaded into RAM the function run_bios() is called. In that function there is a printk_debug("entering emulator") just before the call to X86EMU_exec().
I have noticed that the first "e" of the message appears on the screen and is followed by the remainder of the message, character at a time, after much delay (seconds) between characters. Once the call to X86EMU_exec() is made the system never completes the boot process as I do not see any of the messages such as:
Devices initialized Writing IRQ routing tables .... Wrote the mp table ... Moving GDT to 0x500 .....
I also do not see the POST code of 0x89 (out of hardwaremain() after dev_initialize() completes.
I would be interested in hearing if anyone has successsfully used this card on a Tyan S2895 with LinuxBIOS or on any other motherboard with LinuxBIOS. Booting the standard Tyan BIOS (PhoenixBIOS 1.01.2895) and running SuSE 10.0 it works fine.
I would also be interested in hearing which addon VGA cards have been used successfully (lately) on the S2895 as the S2895 does not have a VGA capability on the motherboard.
Thanks BJ