Re: [PATCH 0/5] fbdev: tdfxfb: Make "unbooted" cards work

[Helge Deller]

On 7/30/26 20:26, Daniel Palmer wrote:
> Currently using voodoo cards that weren't booted by the video
> BIOS aren't usable.
>
> This means if you happen to have a proper - non-x86 - computer,
> another card is the primary or you have a new BIOS that cannot
> run the video BIOS tdfxfb would probe but you be staring at
> "no signal detected".
>
> This series implements manually booting cards using the
> values from the video BIOS' own table.
>
> Debugging was partially assisted by Claude Fable 5. I could not
> work out why this would not work for months so I told it to
> create a voodoo 3 emulation for QEMU to compare the BIOS against
> my code. That made it obvious my init sequence matched the BIOS
> but the VGA core wasn't running.
>
> This has been tested on a real voodoo 3 in an x86-64 board.
> I have some patches to add an interface for doing 3D rendering
> that are not included in this series and 3D rendering is also
> working so as far as I can tell everything is good.

Nice work!

Series applied to fbdev git tree.

Thanks for doing this!
Helge

 
> Daniel Palmer (5):
>    fbdev: tdfxfb: Add helper to read config table from BIOS
>    fbdev: tdfxfb: Attempt to detect if the card wasn't booted
>    fbdev: tdfxfb: Manually boot unbooted cards
>    fbdev: tdfxfb: Wake the VGA core before programming the CRTC
>    fbdev: tdfxfb: Program the initial video mode
>
>   drivers/video/fbdev/tdfxfb.c | 151 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>   1 file changed, 151 insertions(+)