> On Thu, 26 Feb 1998, teunis wrote:
> > - I run multiple videocards. fbcons does _NOT_ support multiple
> > PCI adapters. At least ones that don't initialize themselves.
>
> No? The driver for ATI video boards does initialize the board itself. Besides,
> on decent machines the firmware (e.g. Open Firmware) knows how to initialize
> the board in a CPU-independent manner ;-)
Well - S3-Trio64V+ and S3-ViRGE do _NOT_. And I run both. So it's GGI for
me for now. (as soon as I figure out how to tell GGI to initialize one of
them - I'm not the only one with this combo but I haven't tried activating
the second card yet...)
Neither card is safe from userspace FWIW, and S3-ViRGE/GX has a nasty
tendency to crash under XFree86 for me...
And the primary reason for KGI's long development time is that most
hardware is __NOT__ decent hardware by your definition. AFAIK the Matrox
Millenium-series cards are the only ones I know of.
(and anyone who thinks that initializing a PCI card from userspace has
never done it on either a multicpu system or on a single-CPU system that
fergot to CLI/STI. I lost ~30megs data from that "accident".. *whoops* :)
[easily recovered - I believe in backups :]
... though initializing some cards may require disabling the current card
then running BIOS-reset on the new card under DOSemu.... Never tried it
but I _STRONGLY_ suspect the Trio64V+'s gonna require that.
> OK, atyfb doesn't support multiple ATI boards yet, but that's a question of
> hours...
You're lucky you have such a nice computer and managed to get either docs
from ATI on your board (real lucky!) or have a board that's
self-initializing. (sorry - it took me 3 months to get docs on the S3
cards but the ATI docs are _NOT_ available afaik. At least not for
anything newer than Mach64)
> Oh yeah, I'm _not_ saying that everyone should be using fbcon. For plain PCs,
> vgacon is fine. We just need the full abstract console code to be in the kernel
> for machines that always boot with a graphical screen, not text mode. So, on
> machines without decent firmware, you'll be stuck with vgacon and VGA text
> mode, and XFree86 :-)
or KGI/EvStacks - which is what I use. I'm happy :)
[I also am programming userspace consoles - something not possible without
EvStacks or equiv... I want ioctl's forewarded to userspace, eh? A
console without, say, loadable font support is pretty weak]
G'day, eh? :)
- Teunis
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