Re: matroxfb on SMP alpha
So then it will never be able to initialize most PCI devices? That's a
crappy design... How many PCI devices don't have a BIOS?
Now that I think more about it that's not entirely true. There isn't
VGA support in the bios emulator. It interprets video commands
and redirects it to the console. I'll elaborate.
First make sure you have v5.8 SRM installed and then find
a NIC that SRM has drivers for and put it in the CS20. An modern day
intel nic would be ideal, something that has executable
firmware. Once you get to SRM type "show bios". You'll
see the card listed as eia0. Now type "run bios eia0"
You'll see what you would normally see on a video display rendered
as best as SRM can figure mapped to the serial console. It should
accept keyboard input and recognize the directional keys properly.
Note, You may not be able to return to SRM
from this point unless the firmware has an exit option.
Wouldn't the bios emulator be part of SRM? Is there anything I can do
from the SRM to initialize the card?
I seem to recall that the bios emulator was a separate entity tacked
onto
the beginning on the SRM ROM image which SRM would then call back
to when the functionality is needed. I had the idea once to hex edit out
the bios emulator out of newer SRM versions and graft it onto something
like the LX's SRM rom image. I never got around to it, maybe someone
wants to try?
If you're really lucky you may see "vga0" listed in the output from
"show bios" . Then you could theoretically "run bios vga0". Execute
it and it should return control back to SRM console. The the card
would be setup and X or dev/fb would have a chance. I don't know
if you'll succeed in getting past the VGA bios initialization, it just
may get stuck.
If you don't see vga0 listed you may be able to reference it's
PCI hose position and hope run bios will accept it. I can't
be sure about the invocation, I don't have a comparable
machine here to run tests. "show config"
It was never meant to be a console machine, It was specially designed
for mass clustering and to operate headless.
Well, I have a backup use for it if I can't get it to display anything.
(I got it cheap off ebay for video encoding)
Well, You could sell it back for a pretty penny,
Your only hope is to somehow get the Xfree bios emulator to set up
the card properly. Last time I checked, their bios emulator still
depends on the previous firmware to have "done the right thing (tm)".
XFree86 hangs on startup without ever doing anything to the screen. It
does say:
(WW) MGA(0): Video BIOS info block not detected!
Yup, SRM walked right past it. Wonder what lspci -v says about it's
address
space?
Peter
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