From: Jesse Barnes <jbarnes@virtuousgeek.org>
To: "Jon Smirl" <jonsmirl@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [RFC] enhancing the kernel's graphics subsystem
Date: Tue, 22 May 2007 09:15:50 -0700
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Cc: "Alan Cox" <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>, "Jeff Garzik" <jeff@garzik.org>,
       "Jesse Barnes" <jesse.barnes@intel.com>, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org,
       "Antonino A. Daplas" <adaplas@gmail.com>
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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.

They may have hardcoded information about how a particular board is wired 
up--it's ok to use that (makes the DAC discovery much easier).  We just 
want to avoid relying on the VBIOS for DAC setup and output probing, since 
we'll need to do that ourselves for suspend resume and to fully support 
various multihead configurations.

Jesse
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