--- Ian Romanick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > How does all this work on non-x86 systems? Since the rest of the world, > thankfully, doesn't use compiled machine code in the on-card firmware, > how is that handled? *Is* that handled? :)
The main purpose is to initialize secondary adapters that the system BIOS did not init. So the patch only gets activated when there are multiple video adapters installed. A much better fix for this would be to alter the Linux kernel to initialize these adapters during the very beginning of the boot process before entering protected mode. This is really a BIOS shortcoming that we are trying to fix in user space. There are several problems but the problems are not unique to my patch, X and framebuffer have the same issues. X contains a variation of this code that runs in user space. Mucking with PCI bridges from user space seems very risky to me. The patch uses the kernel entry points to muck with the bridges. 1) X86 card in a non-X86 machine. People usually do this to save money. Most common case is running X86 card in PPC. Another time this occurs is on the Itanium. To address this I have the source for a x86 emulator that can be linked into the video-reset program. I haven't tried doing this yet because I don't own any non-X86 hardware. 2) OpenFirmware. These cards won't work as secondary unless the system BIOS supports it. If someone has an OpenFirmware interpreter this could be made to work on other architectures. Nothing bad will happen in my code, the entry point where I jump to just has an x86 return instruction in it. There is no universal solution for all platforms. Right now framebuffer doesn't address secondary adapters, so I wouldn't be surprised if they took some of the code out of the DRM patch and added it back to framebuffer. Other parts of the code are copied straight from framebuffer; the code in framebuffer was derived from the code in X. Of course I wouldn't need to do this at all if we had enough information from the manufacturers to add a reset function to the device drivers. I'm trying to build a unified driver that combines the best of framebuffer and DRM so there is code that I copied from both places. I then want to take the unified driver and add some new features to it. ===== Jon Smirl [EMAIL PROTECTED] __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - More reliable, more storage, less spam http://mail.yahoo.com ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by: IBM Linux Tutorials Free Linux tutorial presented by Daniel Robbins, President and CEO of GenToo technologies. Learn everything from fundamentals to system administration.http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=1470&alloc_id=3638&op=click -- _______________________________________________ Dri-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dri-devel
