* ron minnich rminnich@lanl.gov [030717 16:09]:
On Thu, 17 Jul 2003, Stefan Reinauer wrote:
I noticed that for video initialization I need to keep a copy of the video rom in the system rom for execution. This definitely makes sense for onboard graphics, but for other devices it would be nice to just use the option roms held on expansion cards. (Like Video cards, SCSI controllers, network cards, etc)
that works. In other words, for linuxbios vga support, the vga startup code will find an option room for a VGA device and use it. That code could be extended for arbitrary expansion roms.
I'm not sure you want to always do that. Some of these expansion roms for disk cards want to interact with you on bootup, which is crazy for a cluster node (crazy in general, as far as I'm concerned).
It is, but it would allow to boot off any scsi controller you put into such a box. Since quite some systems around have scsi only or in addition to IDE, this would be very nice to have.
I think the ADLO code works the way it does because it was set up on an SIS 630 which had built-in graphics.
So with the LinuxBIOS builtin code this is different?
The only real issue is expansion roms that break the rules. Some VGA roms (e.g. older Nvidia) con't quite follow the rules, and that is hard to fix.
Have an example? I assume you need a workaround for these specific cards then? I know that pretty well from the Alpha days :-(
But all the bits are there in linuxbios to support arbitrary expansion roms. Let me know if you hit trouble.
I was playing around with ADLO on the K8, and I could get it to load grub, but grub hung right after loading stage2 every time. Video did not work at all. I'll give the builtin stuff a try.
Stefan