ADLO, Framebuffer et al.

Stefan Reinauer stepan at suse.de
Thu Jul 17 10:08:00 CEST 2003


* ron minnich <rminnich at 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





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