On Sat, 3 Aug 2002, Jake Page wrote: > > ie. it looks like the card's BIOS may be necessary to get it working... > (unless/until someone figures out what it's doing and puts it into the > driver, at least :) Heh, it feels so CLOSE I'm tempted to go pick up a > Mac card to see if it works ;)
Sorry, probably poor form to keep replying to my own emails, but... Surprisingly my "alternate" etherboot method almost worked without modification - I built an "Etherboot floppy" build with IDE, serial console, ELF multiboot, etc, and then set the MS7308E original BIOS to boot from floppy only. EB-IDE read my kernel image from CF, and boots it almost perfectly. I start up XFree86 w/ DRI for the Radeon PCI and it works (at least with the minimal OpenGL test I tried - ie. glxgears... 300fps vs. 50fps w/out DRI...) The only problems I am having are 1) the onboard SIS900 ethernet isn't working. Is there anything about the linux-2.4.17-sis.patch in the LinuxBIOS tree that would mess this up when using a normal BIOS? (I didn't see anything but might as well ask...) The kernel does look like it's initializing it... sis900.c: v1.08.02 11/30/2001 PCI: Found IRQ 15 for device 00:01.1 eth0: SiS 900 Internal MII PHY transceiver found at address 1. eth0: Using transceiver found at address 1 as default eth0: SiS 900 PCI Fast Ethernet at 0xda00, IRQ 15, 00:d0:09:a2:0b:f0. But then I try to configure it/use it etc, and get: NETDEV WATCHDOG: eth0: transmit timed out eth0: Transmit timeout, status 00000000 00000279 2) MTRRs are all being used, I think mostly because sis-lite video driver uses a few registers for the onbaord AGP. This doesn't leave any for the Radeon DRI, which I imagine can't be too good for its performance. I I could go into the sis driver kernel code and disable that, but anyone know if it's possible to actually DISABLE the SIS onboard AGP completely!? (heh, with the stock BIOS, I KNOW it's possible with LinuxBIOS... ;) There was a setting for PCI as primary, but nothing for disabling AGP (and I could only reduce the shared mem to 2MB - it's stealing my RAM!!) I guess these questions are not exactly LinuxBIOS related, but I guess I need to get everything working under the original BIOS (ideally with the same kernel image) before I can figure out what's different in LB... -Jake
