ADLO, Framebuffer et al.
ron minnich
rminnich at lanl.gov
Thu Jul 17 09:58:00 CEST 2003
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).
I think the ADLO code works the way it does because it was set up on an
SIS 630 which had built-in graphics.
> Is this just a matter of mapping the roms into address space, or is
> there some higher magic preventing this to happen?
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.
But all the bits are there in linuxbios to support arbitrary expansion
roms. Let me know if you hit trouble.
ron
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