On Tue, Aug 30, 2005 at 07:06:22PM -0400, Michael wrote: >Hello, > >> Is the implication here that plugging a PC PCI graphics card into >> a powerpc machine will never work (as a secondary display), even >> if the software driving it knows how to initialise it in the absence >> of OpenFirmware? > >Of course not. All I said is that you're rather unlikely to find a >VESA BIOS on a graphics card in a non-PC-box. And in the case at hand - >tdfx - we don't need firmware help to set up the hardware anyway.
The tdfx driver will attempt to use the int10 module to soft-boot a secondary card. Except on powerpc because right now that is #ifdef'd out. Many drivers will not work correctly on secondary cards without this, including the tdfx driver on some tdfx cards I've used in the past. My original question about whether these things still need to be #ifdef'd out on powerpc platforms (yet they are not on other non-x86 platforms) is independent of whether it is typically needed on those platforms. XFree86 strives to run on more than just the most common hardware configurations. Marc appears to have fixed various issues for int10/vbe on non-x86 platforms as part of his sparc work. Perhaps some of those same issues prevented this stuff from working on powerpc in the past and so these #ifdef's can be removed now. int10/vbe should fail-safe on hardware that does not have an x86 BIOS, and if they don't it is a bug. After all, one of the reasons for having an x86 emulator is so that PC video cards can be soft-booted on non-x86 platforms. It would also be nice to be able to "soft-boot" OpenFirmware cards on platforms that don't support that natively. David _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list Devel@XFree86.Org http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/devel
