On Tuesday, May 22, 2007, Jon Smirl wrote: > On 5/22/07, Jesse Barnes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On Tuesday, May 22, 2007, Jon Smirl wrote: > > > I've talked to an ATI engineer about VBIOS initialization. The chips > > > may have different steppings. They flash the right VBIOS that > > > matches the chip into the ROM on the card. Given all the various > > > steppings this is the only sane way to initialize the hardware. I > > > don't believe generic initialization code that can handle all of the > > > various steppings exists for any hardware. > > > > I think you must have misunderstood. Last time I worked on ATI, there > > was a single ROM image that supported several (maybe even all) of > > their addin cards. There's nothing magical about them... But that's > > beside the point. > > What about the poke the obscure value into this undocumented IO port > class of problem where they are using the chip test interface to work > around bugs in the silicon. > > He also mentioned that all of the OEMs change the standard ROM image > before loading it onto their cards to handle how they wired things up > and bugs in other chips.
Right, I think that's where most of the real differences are: configuration tables. And Linux drivers will want to continue to make use of those. > Of course I don't have the source for the ROM so I don't know the > accuracy of what I was told. Yeah, it would be nice if we could get the ROM sources, would probably make for some interesting (and maybe frightening) reading. :) Jesse - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
