Non-x86 Video

Bari Ari bari at onelabs.com
Wed May 5 18:39:01 CEST 2004


Eric W. Biederman wrote:

> Bari Ari <bari at onelabs.com> writes:
> 
> 
>>ron minnich wrote:
>>
>>
>>>we are working on putting the emulator into linuxbios as an optional
>>>component. Once this is done, I think the prognosis is good. We've gotten
>>>distracted by fixing other things needed to support the emulator.
>>
>>What will be needed to run video on non-x86? The oem videoBIOS plus an 8086
>>emulator for when videoBIOS calls are made?
> 
> 
> For hardware that is not on a plugin card it will likely be an ATI Rage XL
> or a simlar low end chip and we can get the docs to initialize it.  YhLu
> and Stefan have already accomplished that for the ATI Rage XL, and that linuxbios
> driver should have no arch dependencies. 
> 
> For a plugin card we need to run the boot rom just to initialize the card.  After
> that all of the standard Linux code should work.

We design all our own boards and have the access to the graphics 
processor data as well as the vendors videoBIOS.

For x86 it's easy for us. We get oem drivers and the tools to modify the 
oem videoBIOS.

For non-x86 such as ARM the GPU developers (who make the silicon) don't 
have answers since they only work in the x86 world or a very small 
fraction know PPC for Apple or IBM.

ATI and nVidia don't let source out for the most current parts. There is 
some xFree86 driver source for the 3-4 year old devices. For ATI there 
may be source for up the Radeon 9000. That source is what were looking 
at to get PC GPU's working on ARM with ARMLinux.

-Bari





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