[OpenBIOS] Video

Jeff Garzik jgarzik at mandrakesoft.com
Fri Feb 18 11:37:07 CET 2000


"Ronald G. Minnich" wrote:
> 
> On Fri, 18 Feb 2000, Todd Whitesel wrote:
> > Talk to the XFree86 4.0 guys; they're tackling the problem right now because
> > they want to handle multi-headed machines, and (except for certain double
> > headed products from people like Matrox) only one card can occupy the legacy
> > ISA address area so extra cards never have their VGA BIOS' run at all.
> 
> Thanks, that is a *great* idea.
> 
> The thing is, the chip on the L440GX is a cirrus, and cirrus has always
> been pretty good about open specs on their chips. If it were one of the
> other companies I would think about giving up :-) I think we can get this.
> We'll be talking to the xfree guys.

I am an "XFree86 guy"

The current plan is to use BIOS-initialized VGA for the primary head,
and vm86 mode (BIOS and BIOS calls!) to initialize the video BIOS of all
secondary heads.  If vm86 mode is not possible, then an X86 emulator,
x86emu, does the job.

So, you need to run the video BIOS of the first head.

That's solution number one.

Solution number two:  use framebuffer devices inside Linux kernel for
video.  "fbdev" is designed mainly for machines where no text graphics
mode (e.g. vgacon) exists, but it can be used for any platform.

-- 
Jeff Garzik         | Writing software is
Building 1024       | more fun than working.
MandrakeSoft, Inc.  | 	-Anon
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