Re: matroxfb on SMP alpha
On Friday, January 24, 2003, at 06:11 PM, Bob McElrath wrote:
Jay Estabrook [Jay.Estabrook@compaq.com] wrote:
Most PCI devices (installed in an Alpha :-) don't need their BIOS run;
can you think of devices other than VGA and SCSI where it's really
necessary? And most SCSI can deal with it *not* running, via some set
of defaults, I believe.
Yeah VGA and SCSI.
The sym driver actually has some sane values to fallback to if it's
nvram is
in an undefined state. fyi.
I wonder if manually programming the PCI configuration space would be
helpful? I could put the card in another machine and read the PCI
config space (when it's working) with 'lspci -xxx', and then write it
on
the cs20 with 'pcitweak' from XFree86. There is probably more that the
BIOS does though...
You can do that from SRM. There is complete access to the hardware
registers. it wouldn't be unreasonable to figure out enough of the PCI
initialization by hand (bit banging ) and then save that to SRM's nvram
so it would executed at power on, not sure about hard reset.
See the SRM manual. examine and deposit are what you should familiarize
you with.
http://ftp.digital.com/pub/Digital/info/semiconductor/literature/
srmcons.pdf
I've actually got one of those beasties, but I won't be able to
commission
it until next week to look into this. Can you wait?
Certainly! Thanks for your time! I realize I'm trying to do
something I'm not
really supposed to do, so ignore me if you like.
Yeah but it's fun.
An interesting datapoint: this is a Marvel (TV-card) and using the
linux
marvel drivers I can record video from the card just fine in the cs20.
It just won't put anything on the video out except text.
Also, I just compiled-in matroxfb, and I get boot penguins.
Try a uni-processor kernel. eliminate that variable.
I've tried all combinations of the kernel command-line parameters
video=matrox:init:nobios . Also this post:
http://www.directfb.org/mailinglists/directfb-dev/2002/03-2002/
msg00042.html
claims that matroxfb can initialize this card...
Hmmm. That's interesting. You could try contacting the guy... There
may be more to it than just the virtue of using the module.
Peter
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