Re: [linux-fbdev] Re: atyfb with 2.3.30 ond x86

James Simmons (jsimmons@edgeglobal.com)
Thu, 9 Dec 1999 10:25:43 -0500 (EST)


> I concur: I have a couple of PMC (PCI mezzanine cadrs) modules with S3
> chips which I plug on my MVME boards (PPC). I could not find any code that
> would intialize them properly (bad to awful image quality) until I wrote
> a small 486 SX emulator which executes the Video BIOS init routine.
>
> While many BIOS may have bugs, you can be fairly sure that the
> initialization routine is basically correct (otherwise you could not even
> see the Video BIOS copyright line properly).

Ahhhh! Way are hardware companies so brain dead? Intels are not the only
computers in the world. What do we do? Have the kernel have a built in x86
emulator to setup brain dead hardware. I don't want to do that. What
really needs to done is to ask these companies to release the info to set
a mode without resorting to the BIOS.

> [In reference to an earlier thread about multiple heads and mmap problems]
> The amusing thing is that it may actually be easier to support mutiple
> heads on a non x86 machine: my emulator can actually put the real mode
> memory and video at any address in the virtual address space of a user
> mode process since all segment bases are computed as segment*16+a virtual
> base constant which can be changed between invocation of the emulator to
> keep several VM86 machines running (or simply keep different machine state
> structures with different virtual base addresses).

Where is this code?

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---== (_)__ __ ____ __ James Simmons
--== / / _ \/ // /\ \/ / jsimmons@edgeglobal.com
-=====/_/_//_/\_,_/ /_/\_\ fbdev/gfx developer
The choice of a GNU generation

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