> On Fri, 31 Jul 1998, Jan Kratochvil wrote:
> > On Fri, Jul 31, 1998 at 10:37:23AM +0000, Yaroslav Rosomakho wrote:
> > > Look, if you nkow S3 cards, couldn't you write video frame buffer for S3?
> >
> > Please see "/usr/src/linux/drivers/video/S3triofb.c". This is probably
> > what you want but unfortunately its not meant for i386 platform but for
> > PowerPC one where the PowerPC init system (like i386 BIOS) initializes the
> > graphical mode for you.
>
> Yes indeed. The Trio is initialized by Open Firmware in some machines. It isn't
> in mine :-(
On mine (PreP) it would not be initialized at all either, although later
versions of the firmware finally allocate PCI resources. But the worst
part was that the S3 specific initialization code in the PPC port of Linux
would not work either.
To solve the problem I have written a small (~24kB code+data) real mode
80486SX emulator which executes the x86 BIOS initialization routine on the
PPC. It works well for me, but unfortunately AFAIK the few people who
have tried it on their machines have not been successful :-(
The code was written as an user mode utility but still needs some
modifications to run under 2.1. Of course I'm using a serial console
since the screen is unreadable until the utility runs.
> The Trio video mode initialization code is also required if you want other
> video modes than the 640x480x8 from OF, or if your version of OF doesn't
> support Trio. And then it can be shared with ia32...
Yep.
> > is like duplicating GGI work. And Linus said that he wouldn't like such
> > code in kernel anyway.
>
> On some platforms, we need it anyway, thus...
Exactly.
Greetings,
Gabriel.
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