On Sunday 09 December 2007, Oliver McFadden wrote:
I believe the parser in radeonhd is also compiled into the BIOS flashed to the card. I guessed this from some left over preprocessor defines, etc.
Not quite,
As far as I know, the AtomBIOS on the card consists of an interpreter in x86 code, some binary scripts executed by the interpreter, and some data tables, all wrapped up inside the PCI expansion ROM format.
That's right. My understanding is AtomBIOS basically consists of tables/code run by an interpreter. The card's ROM has one, and radeonHD has a different one.
The opcodes and format of the binary scripts and data tables are described by the parser code, so I think there is enough information, except for how to actually flash the on-card ROM...
My first interest is to _use_ AtomBIOS cards, and hence I started working on getting the interpreter glued to LinuxBIOS. At least my monitor currently stays totally black with LinuxBIOS, until X comes up, see my previous mails to this list.
Torsten