[coreboot] vga not working

Arnaud Maye arnaud.maye at 4dsp.com
Wed Jul 29 10:31:59 CEST 2009


Hello Kevin,

Kevin O'Connor wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 12:50:46PM +0200, Arnaud Maye wrote:
>   
>> The strange square pattern has a 720x400 resolution, this is what is
>> happening as soon the vga console is turned on.
>>     
> [...]
>   
>>> I have tried two GFX cards :
>>> - Matrox G550 pci express 1 lane
>>> - Club3D 8500GT Silent edition 16 lanes
>>>
>>> Both of the cards behaving same besides colors of the squares.
>>>       
>
> Hi Arnaud,
>
> I don't know what would cause this.  A couple of guesses:
>
> * coreboot isn't setting up the pci space with the correct legacy
>   ranges
>   
We are talking about the GFX cards legacy ranges, right? I think Myles 
looked at the PCI
allocation already it seems everything is fine there.

"Re: [coreboot] non static < 0x1000 IO space can be broken |    
(EP80579) Addition"

> * seabios isn't implementing some bios feature the card is expecting
>
> Because you're seeing this on two completely different vga cards, I'd
> guess that it's something with the coreboot pci setup.  I'm not
> familiar with Club3D - can you verify it isn't also using a Matrox
> chip?
>   

The Club3D card is using a Nvidia G86 chipset. Quite a recent chipset.

http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=8839

The G550 :

http://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/products/graphics_cards/g_series/g550pcie/

Both these cards are PCIe cards.

> -Kevin
>
>
>
>   
As everything is not so bad, some good news. Actually besides the VGA 
(output) and Keyboard (input) my linux is booting from hard disk. I can
SSH to the hardware. I've attached our FM577 using a PMC->PCIe adapter 
just before and it is recognized. I will try a few DMAs later on.

Kevin are you able to recommend me any recent PCIe card which is known 
to be working "out of the box" under seabios? That way I will just
purchase this adapter to get up and running with the VGA. Actually I 
need to get XP to boot so I would need VGA to diagnose the windows
boot this is going to be easier.

Thank you

Kevin
*
*




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