VGA Problem about 440bx chipset

[Richard Smith]

>> > Wow! I got it!
>> > I use another S3 video card,and succeeded in bringing up the VGA,and  

Excellent.  Its really touchy about what VBIOS will work and what won't.
    I haven't been able to narrow it down as to what the missing piece
is yet.

ATI seems to be the worst though.  Probally because of all the bios
extensions they use.

> perhaps it would make sense to summarize "lessons learned" and send them
> to list, so that whoever will play with ADLO next can benefit from the
> knowledge

Setting up a "known to work" table of chipsets vs cards may be a good
idea as well.

> Just put in all right keywords so that it is easie to find it later on,
> like ADLO, S3, etc. The shadow patch probably isn't big either.

After my initial post of the patch (about a 1.5 years ago) I never
really tried to push the patch upstream since its chipset specific.

What's really needed here is vga expansion rom shadowing support in the
pci resource allocation code.  So that you could do something like this
in the config file.

option SHADOW_VGA_BIOS=1
option SHADOW_VGA_BIOS_DEST=0xC0000

Then the mainboard chipset code could handle copying it from the PCI ROM
to the shadow location and ADLO would not need to know anything about
how to shadow for a specific chipset.

I for one could really use this feature.  I'd offer to code up an
implementation for the 440bx but I don't have much of a clue on how the
PCI resource allocation works.