Hi,
Actually you answered the problem....
Jeff Garzik wrote:
Can you turn on word wrap in your mailer, Matthew?
I have but it's set to a high figure to stop it screwing with my mails... Doh! :-)
Matthew Sullivan wrote:
The only thing I haven't worked out is if you have a card not located in the usual position most BIOS's will still boot it... but none of the BIOS's seem to want to init any second card.... (That includes the second VGA port on a couple of twin TVGA 9000 series cards I had to work on a while ago...)
By virtue of the fact that two cards cannot share a single VGA region, you can only init a single card. So that makes perfect sense. The standard BIOS reaction to multiple video cards is to -not- execute the BIOS init sequence for secondary/tertiary cards, but to instead disable their MMIO and PIO decoding altogether.
Which answers it...
This is why XFree86 must map and execute the video BIOS for a secondary card, before it can be used as a secondary head.
My conclusion to this is there must be a global identifier to indicate the card is a display card... and the current BIOS's look for this so that they can determine, 1/ There is a display card in the system, and 2/ where it is ... I say this because last time I put 2 PCI VGA cards in a machine (not the same type) no matter what addresses I set them to and which slot they physically located, the same card booted each time...!?! This may be worth investigating further....
Now -that- is strange. If there is no video BIOS in the standard location, it would seem logical to initialize the first PCI_CLASS_DISPLAY card found... or maybe PCI_CLASS_DISPLAY_VGA.
However cards/the bus seem to have 'priority' between cards (I do _not_ know PCI bus operation) two different cards would work in different ways and have a different priority as to what memory areas they get.... As the card is not in the 'default video' location it's getting picked up on and by the PCI bus/PCI controller/PCI software and then being initallized...
First one started on the bus reset gets initiallized...? ...The answer...?
-- Yours
Matthew
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- You are validating my inherent mistrust of strangers.