[OpenBIOS] Platform for the OPENBIOS question

[Stefan Reinauer]

* Ronald G Minnich <rminnich at lanl.gov> [010821 21:03]:
> On Tue, 21 Aug 2001, Stefan Reinauer wrote:
> 
> > In fact, not having an Open Firmware compliant ROM on a PCI adapter breaks
> > compliance to the PCI standard, which makes total sense.
> 
> stefan, doesn't that make every vga card out there a violator? does any
> good graphics hardware have fcode in the rom for init?

As far as I understand the specs, yes, this is true. Depending on what you
consider good, maybe there are some cards - the Sun Ultra5/10 have PCI graphics
adaptors that contain such a code, so it should be possible to use these when
the basic API to OpenFirmware is working. I know that Adaptec has FCode 
Firmware on some of their scsi adaptors. I don't know how much these cards'
hardware differs from their PC equivalents. Eventually it is even possible
to reflash some of the PC cards with the Fcode firmware, but I don't know
about legal issues when doing this. Though, at least Adaptec had FCode updates
on their web page some time ago.

> If at any point you get something going we would like to see about linking
> it in to linuxbios. If this works you will have more platforms to work
> with.

Since you have far more experience with the early setup code, I think this
would be a very good symbiosis.

  Best regards
      Stefan

-- 
Mad, adj.:
        Affected with a high degree of intellectual independence.
                -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
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