On Friday, April 04, 2014 10:00:41 AM ron minnich wrote:
I have this nice board, with a nice AMD cpu, and I get no graphics. Why? Because AMD won't release the VGA blob. So the board is headless.
Are you talking about a board which originally came with IBV firmware? In that case, you may be able to extract the blob from linux while running on said firmware.
Another addition to the blob matrix. sigh.
How can you add a blob that you don't have? And what CPU is that? Do you think we can get native VGA init running? (fork thread if you answer this second question)
It's really not that just one vendor is bad and one is good. AMD has its issues too.
So, say I have this Intel southbridge. I go online, look it up, and I can get a public datasheet with register definitions and programming information. So now I have this Hudson southbridge. It's AMD, so it should be a piece of cake to get everything I need, right?
Turns out the only public document on that is an erratta sheet (DING-DONG!). So, I ask around , and it turns out that that there's an AMD Embedded Developer site which should have this info. OK, so maybe I didn't know where to look. I go to said site, and it requires registration (DING-DONG!). I start the registration process, and I am asked to agree to an NDA (police siren!). I read that NDA, and it does seem to disqualify me from contributing to coreboot (police siren getting closer!), as this would not be considered using the information for "internal evaluation". An NDA for a register guide? What the flunk?
So, I go to AMD's email support form, where they have a nice category for "Technical Documentation", and I explain why I cannot agree to said NDA, and politely request the documents I need. They tell me that's not possible without the NDA. So I ask them if I can get an NDA which explicitly allows FLOSS. I get a (sales) phone number.
AMD is full of... On the other hand, nothing beneficial to them has come from coreboot. I can't blame them for losing interest. They get involved, contribute, spend time and money making their stuff upstreamable, and everyone still uses chips from competitors who are hostile towards coreboot. I bet they're pretty pissed off about this. I definitely would be if I were in their shoes.
It's a wonder I have any teeth left, given all the gnashing I get to do :-)
Dentistry has come a long way in the past decades.
Alex
Now, there's no need to be that mean, ok? AMD are not bad guys in my view. But they have made some seriously boneheaded decisions, and locking up the VGA bios is one of them.
We can't get anywhere calling people names like this.
ron
On Fri, Apr 04, 2014 at 12:38:07PM -0500, mrnuke wrote:
On Friday, April 04, 2014 10:00:41 AM ron minnich wrote:
I have this nice board, with a nice AMD cpu, and I get no graphics. Why? Because AMD won't release the VGA blob. So the board is headless.
Are you talking about a board which originally came with IBV firmware? In that case, you may be able to extract the blob from linux while running on said firmware.
Another addition to the blob matrix. sigh.
How can you add a blob that you don't have? And what CPU is that? Do you think we can get native VGA init running? (fork thread if you answer this second question)
If only we at the RadeonHD project had had our way...
We were only a few hundred lines of C away from full hw init with our modesetting code. Basically, the board specific bits were not done by us, but that was reasonably limited, and i was hoping that someone would find the time and would port the first IGP or even discrete card, and open the floodgates...
But that of course never happened.
AMD lost further control of ATI and Redhat saw it necessary to join forces with ATI. The enemy of my enemy and such. And RadeonHD was declared to be the code from the MS devil, amongst many other baseless things...
Now we get to keep both pieces, thank you redhat.
Luc Verhaegen.
And here's where we thank Intel, btw. They've done a truly wonderful job of getting code into the Linux kernel that I was able to use to open up chipset init for sandybridge, ivybridge, and haswell, A tip of the hat to Intel and Jesse Barnes especially for all they've done in that area.
So let's keep in mind, not everybody's perfect, and not everybody's a bad guy. There are some terrific people at Intel who've done some great things for open source drivers.
ron
----- Mail d'origine ----- De: Luc Verhaegen libv@skynet.be À: mrnuke mr.nuke.me@gmail.com Cc: ron minnich rminnich@gmail.com, coreboot@coreboot.org Envoyé: Sat, 05 Apr 2014 03:21:07 +0200 (CEST) Objet: Re: [coreboot] AMD doesn't get it either in some ways (the bastards!!!)
On Fri, Apr 04, 2014 at 12:38:07PM -0500, mrnuke wrote:
On Friday, April 04, 2014 10:00:41 AM ron minnich wrote:
I have this nice board, with a nice AMD cpu, and I get no graphics. Why? Because AMD won't release the VGA blob. So the board is headless.
Are you talking about a board which originally came with IBV firmware? In that case, you may be able to extract the blob from linux while running on said firmware.
Another addition to the blob matrix. sigh.
How can you add a blob that you don't have? And what CPU is that? Do you think we can get native VGA init running? (fork thread if you answer this second question)
If only we at the RadeonHD project had had our way...
We were only a few hundred lines of C away from full hw init with our modesetting code. Basically, the board specific bits were not done by us, but that was reasonably limited, and i was hoping that someone would find the time and would port the first IGP or even discrete card, and open the floodgates...
But that of course never happened.
Naive question : Is it too late to find a remedy to that? Why?
AMD lost further control of ATI and Redhat saw it necessary to join forces with ATI. The enemy of my enemy and such. And RadeonHD was declared to be the code from the MS devil, amongst many other baseless things...
Now we get to keep both pieces, thank you redhat.
Luc Verhaegen.
Can you elaborate further on this? I wasn't aware that Redhat has this kind of attitude..
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