The VIA EPIA MII can be bought with an LVDS port on it and I was wondering the compatibility of this. Obviously its not supported under LinuxBIOS, but would it work under Linux? A guy told me that the LCD panel had to be supported by VIA's BIOS for it to work. Should Linux be able to setup something like this since LinuxBIOS leaves most of that stuff to Linux or does it have to be done by the BIOS (ie if Linux doesn't support LVDS)?
Thanks, Michael Robinson mrobinson@fuzzymuzzle.com www.fuzzymuzzle.com
It looks like LVDS is a BIOS only thing, all of the pages on getting it running under Linux refer you back to the BIOS... Hmm...
Michael Robinson wrote:
The VIA EPIA MII can be bought with an LVDS port on it and I was wondering the compatibility of this. Obviously its not supported under LinuxBIOS, but would it work under Linux? A guy told me that the LCD panel had to be supported by VIA's BIOS for it to work. Should Linux be able to setup something like this since LinuxBIOS leaves most of that stuff to Linux or does it have to be done by the BIOS (ie if Linux doesn't support LVDS)?
Thanks, Michael Robinson mrobinson@fuzzymuzzle.com www.fuzzymuzzle.com
Linuxbios mailing list Linuxbios@clustermatic.org http://www.clustermatic.org/mailman/listinfo/linuxbios
Michael Robinson wrote:
It looks like LVDS is a BIOS only thing, all of the pages on getting it running under Linux refer you back to the BIOS... Hmm...
Thats because thats normally a bios/vbios type deal. When you are dealing with a panel direct its a whole different ball game.
Do you know if the LVDS is part of the EPIA video system or if its seperate descrete chips?
LVDS has a couple of flavors depending on what type of panel you are talking to. So the vbios will normally query the system bios for a panel type or some bios config setting. Based on the panel type it will set the internal chip registers or toggle gpio lines to put descrete chips in the right mode.
CRTC Timeings are also panel specific. There are VESA timeings but lots of panels still need tweaking.
some linux fb drivers and X drivers can deal with these issues but for legacy VGA mode the vbios enables some video sytem trickery.
From what I've read it appears that the actual GPU is built into the Northbridge with integrated 8x AGP but the output is handled by different chips depending on what format you want to output in (ie Composite, VGA, LVDS). The chipset homepage is here: http://www.via.com.tw/en/c-series/cle266.jsp and apparently the LVDS chip is a Chrontel 7019A (VIA's part number for it is the LVDS-01). I've uploaded the PDF datasheet for the LVDS-01 here: http://www.fuzzymuzzle.com/uploads/LVDS-01.pdf I'll Google this chip and see if anyone else has had any luck with it on Linux.
Thanks, Michael Robinson mrobinson@fuzzymuzzle.com www.fuzzymuzzle.com
Richard Smith wrote:
Michael Robinson wrote:
It looks like LVDS is a BIOS only thing, all of the pages on getting it running under Linux refer you back to the BIOS... Hmm...
Thats because thats normally a bios/vbios type deal. When you are dealing with a panel direct its a whole different ball game.
Do you know if the LVDS is part of the EPIA video system or if its seperate descrete chips?
LVDS has a couple of flavors depending on what type of panel you are talking to. So the vbios will normally query the system bios for a panel type or some bios config setting. Based on the panel type it will set the internal chip registers or toggle gpio lines to put descrete chips in the right mode.
CRTC Timeings are also panel specific. There are VESA timeings but lots of panels still need tweaking.
some linux fb drivers and X drivers can deal with these issues but for legacy VGA mode the vbios enables some video sytem trickery.
Well, it seems that the SiS driver supports it, just search for 7019 (all references to it in Google are without the "A") on this page: http://www.xfree86.org/4.4.0/sis.4.html So it must be fairly easy to port the code to the VIA, although the SiS driver most likely takes into account that the BIOS contains display information. All references to the 7019 go to the SiS driver, it must be the only one that implements the LVDS interface.
Michael Robinson wrote:
From what I've read it appears that the actual GPU is built into the Northbridge with integrated 8x AGP but the output is handled by different chips depending on what format you want to output in (ie Composite, VGA, LVDS). The chipset homepage is here: http://www.via.com.tw/en/c-series/cle266.jsp and apparently the LVDS chip is a Chrontel 7019A (VIA's part number for it is the LVDS-01). I've uploaded the PDF datasheet for the LVDS-01 here: http://www.fuzzymuzzle.com/uploads/LVDS-01.pdf I'll Google this chip and see if anyone else has had any luck with it on Linux.
Thanks, Michael Robinson mrobinson@fuzzymuzzle.com www.fuzzymuzzle.com
Richard Smith wrote:
Michael Robinson wrote:
It looks like LVDS is a BIOS only thing, all of the pages on getting it running under Linux refer you back to the BIOS... Hmm...
Thats because thats normally a bios/vbios type deal. When you are dealing with a panel direct its a whole different ball game.
Do you know if the LVDS is part of the EPIA video system or if its seperate descrete chips?
LVDS has a couple of flavors depending on what type of panel you are talking to. So the vbios will normally query the system bios for a panel type or some bios config setting. Based on the panel type it will set the internal chip registers or toggle gpio lines to put descrete chips in the right mode.
CRTC Timeings are also panel specific. There are VESA timeings but lots of panels still need tweaking.
some linux fb drivers and X drivers can deal with these issues but for legacy VGA mode the vbios enables some video sytem trickery.
Linuxbios mailing list Linuxbios@clustermatic.org http://www.clustermatic.org/mailman/listinfo/linuxbios
The data sheet:
http://www.chrontel.com/products/7019.htm
The 7019 is controlled via SPD so if you can access the SPD bus to the 7019 you should be able to make use of the SiS driver source. That may get you part of the way there. To get everything you want done you may need to get the full data sheet.
-Bari
Michael Robinson wrote:
Well, it seems that the SiS driver supports it, just search for 7019 (all references to it in Google are without the "A") on this page: http://www.xfree86.org/4.4.0/sis.4.html So it must be fairly easy to port the code to the VIA, although the SiS driver most likely takes into account that the BIOS contains display information. All references to the 7019 go to the SiS driver, it must be the only one that implements the LVDS interface.
I'd have to get the board before I can figure out what kind of input signal its using and how the board is controlling it through its SPD interface. The chip can accept two digital signals and one variable voltage signal as input (which must be RGB to output LVDS). If the 7019 is using the variable voltage input than it's probably just pulling the video right off of the CLE266's VGA port (RGB). Since the VIA VT1622A (TV Encoder) only accepts YCrCb (whatever this is) and RGB, it seems like the only thing that would make sense for the CLE266 to output would be VGA (that way it can use one signal for the VGA port, TV encoder, and the LVDS transmitter). In this scenario the standard VGA driver with a driver to control the 7019 should work (in theory). The only other signal the 7019 could possibly accept is a digital signal (which I doubt the CLE266 can output, or would choose to output due to the above mentioned facts).
Michael Robinson mrobinson@fuzzymuzzle.com www.fuzzymuzzle.com
Bari Ari wrote:
The data sheet:
http://www.chrontel.com/products/7019.htm
The 7019 is controlled via SPD so if you can access the SPD bus to the 7019 you should be able to make use of the SiS driver source. That may get you part of the way there. To get everything you want done you may need to get the full data sheet.
-Bari
Michael Robinson wrote:
Well, it seems that the SiS driver supports it, just search for 7019 (all references to it in Google are without the "A") on this page: http://www.xfree86.org/4.4.0/sis.4.html So it must be fairly easy to port the code to the VIA, although the SiS driver most likely takes into account that the BIOS contains display information. All references to the 7019 go to the SiS driver, it must be the only one that implements the LVDS interface.
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Bari Ari -
Michael Robinson -
Richard Smith