Jeremy Jackson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> "Eric W. Biederman" wrote:
>
> > If you have a framebuffer driver for the video card you shouldn't need
> > to even touch the video bios. Worst case is that you need to tweak it
> > to actually initialize the video card from the completely unitialized
> > state.
>
> why the difficulty with cirrusfb on linuxbios.org then?
Because we were worrying about other things.
> why does xfree86 use the video bios for multi-headed initialization?
Beats the heck out of me. It may have been a reasonable bang for
the buck compromise to support every card at once. But I wouldn't
without knowing why it is safe, trust the normal BIOS to initialize a
second head if it didn't do it during the boot up sequence. There are
too many legacy i/o ports that overlap on every video card.
> I don't think this is trivial,
> since video card register specs seem to be hard to get (NDA) in many cases
> and/or the init sequence is complicated.
It may not be quite trivial, but it is the direction the kernel is
heading in. I can name at least 3 framebuffer drivers that do
complete video card setup. And there are probably more.
Eric
