Video card issues on 2.4

[Robert Reid <robreid@cse.unsw.edu.au>]

Hi,

I've had an S3 Trio card working satisfactorily on Xfree 4.2 with a 
2.2.20 kernel.  This is on an AlphaStation 500/500, I'm currently using SRM.

For a variety of reasons, I'd like to try and run a 2.4 kernel, but 
found XFree crashed when loading.  It flicked screens, ran the video 
bios (as I got the usual startup VGA Bios message -- 2.2 didn't seem to 
do this...) and then died,
Fatal server error:
xf86MapVidMemSparse:  Could not (dense) mmap fb (No such file or directory)

I found a few notes about this in the axp list archives, and gather that 
someone went wrong running the video bios in an emulator.  Has the way 
the bios emulation stuff works changed considerably from 2.2 to 2.4 to 
cause this problem?  Is there maybe just an extra video / framebuffer / 
something kernel option in 2.4 that will fix this?

I'm just interested since it should be able to be fixed, as it works on 2.2.

I've tried using a S3 Virge DX card I had too, with the same result.

Regards,
Rob