[coreboot] Video card bios project

[Stefan Reinauer]

* dove - railing <doverailing at gmail.com> [110619 14:11]:
> I have phoned Australia and spoke to an expert in Procon.com.au about 2 times
> and corresponded via email.  Procon.com.au are wanting several hundred dollars
> whether it's  my font or theirs.  This is not affordable.  I don't know why vga
> bios is proprietary still and there is not any opensource alternatives.  Thus
> if some opensource enthusiast does it that would be great.  Coreboot project
> are doing main bios.  Similarly if it's done for video card bios that would be
> tremendous.

There is an open source VGA Option ROM coming as part of the SeaBIOS
repository (http://www.seabios.org/). However, it only has support for
the Qemu graphics hardware (and some AMD Geode iirc). So in order to get
it working on your particular graphics card you will have to write code
that initializes the card (that might include initializing the RAM and
GPU on the card, etc). You can run your graphics card option rom in
x86emu and turn logging on to see what hardware accesses it does and try
to replay some of it. It will still need a lot of work to get this
running. Good luck!

Stefan