[LinuxBIOS] Interest in a Free Software BIOS for Radeon cards?

Oliver McFadden z3ro.geek at gmail.com
Mon Dec 10 01:47:56 CET 2007


On 12/9/07, Torsten Duwe <duwe at lst.de> wrote:
> On Sunday 09 December 2007, Oliver McFadden wrote:
>
> > I believe the parser in radeonhd is also compiled into the BIOS flashed to
> > the card. I guessed this from some left over preprocessor defines, etc.
>
> Not quite,

Well, obviously AMD removed a lot of the BIOS specific code, but you can still
see some defines left in the code; grep for PARSER_TYPE etc. Perhaps more
accurate is the BIOS and radeonhd parsers share some code...

> > As far as I know, the AtomBIOS on the card consists of an interpreter in
> > x86 code, some binary scripts executed by the interpreter, and some data
> > tables, all wrapped up inside the PCI expansion ROM format.
>
> That's right. My understanding is AtomBIOS basically consists of tables/code
> run by an interpreter. The card's ROM has one, and radeonHD has a different
> one.
>
> > The opcodes and format of the binary scripts and data tables are described
> > by the parser code, so I think there is enough information, except for how
> > to actually flash the on-card ROM...
>
> My first interest is to _use_ AtomBIOS cards, and hence I started working on
> getting the interpreter glued to LinuxBIOS. At least my monitor currently
> stays totally black with LinuxBIOS, until X comes up, see my previous mails
> to this list.

I'll have to find those sometime... I might get some sleep soon...




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